


Despite Himself

by errantcomment



Category: Notting Hill (1999), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types, Thor (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fusion, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst, F/M, Fluff, Fusion, Loki Has Issues, mundane AU, narfi the cat, steve/tasha secondary couple
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-18
Updated: 2014-01-09
Packaged: 2017-12-23 23:08:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 48,275
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/932164
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/errantcomment/pseuds/errantcomment
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Loki runs a bookshop, because he likes books. Unfortunately, he only found out he didn't like people once he'd had the grand opening. Now he spends a lot of time sulking, talking to his cat, not talking to his housemate, and sulking. Then one day, the shop bell rings and despite himself, it all changes.</p><p>Notting Hill/Avengers/Thor fusion. Mundane AU in which Steve is still a big dude but mostly he's an architect, Natasha is a security consultant, and Thor is a Viking accountant.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter One

**Author's Note:**

> I'm not sure how many chapters this will have in the end. But it has been fully beta'd by someone far more pedantic and bitchy than me. Hurray!

Loki woke up to the screeching sound of a hundred souls in a myriad of tortures, and he flailed at the top of his alarm clock till it stopped. Still comfortably suffocating in his pillow, he opened one eye and decided that on balance, the day wouldn’t get any better if he stayed in bed for ten more minutes. He pulled himself upwards like an Elder God rising from the depths, sat at the edge of his bed and stared at himself in the mirror, which reflected the dim light filtering through the curtains.

“Augh,” he muttered, and relieved some of his feelings by pulling a face in the mirror. This didn’t really help, so he pulled an even worse face, squishing his nose to one side and going ‘blehhh’ like a zombie. Better. Narfi the Huge and Ginger padded over the bed-clothes delicately. 

“Zombie Loki demands brains.” Loki told him. Narfi ignored this, on the basis that none of the words had been ‘food’, in English or in Icelandic. Loki spoke both languages to him in the vague hope the ginger chancer might become bilingual, which had sort of worked, but only for very specific words like ‘fish’, ‘steak’ and for some reason, ‘doner kebab’. Loki petted him, and he arched his back, purring hopefully. 

“Kitty brains no good?” he asked, and (probably) in reply, Narfi hopped off the bed. Loki sighed, and like a good cat-slave, opened his bedroom door. He stepped round Narfi, who genuinely seemed to think that tumbling his slaves head-first down the stairs meant they’d feed him faster, presumably since they got downstairs faster. As Narfi threaded strategically round his ankle, Loki did the particular dance of a man who really doesn’t want to actually kick the cat, but who wouldn’t take it amiss if he accidentally tapped the little bugger. He avoided the cat, but stubbed his toe on a computer casing that hadn't been there the night before.

“Hey, don’t kick that.” His housemate said, amicably. His housemate was an American goatee called Tony, and most of the time, Loki just wanted to go all Lindesfarne on his tiny American head. Tony was sitting on the stairs holding a screwdriver, peacefully tinkering with some undeserving piece of technology. Around him, pieces of what was probably every electronic item in the house presented a deadly obstacle course to the shambling early-morning dead.

“I’ll kick what I like if you insist on leaving it in my door,” Loki growled, switching to English, and stepping over the casing carefully.

“It’s not in my way over there,” Tony said, imperturbably.

“And what have I told you about leaving wires everywhere?” Loki grumbled, for form’s sake, rather than the hope it would stop Tony doing what he was doing. He picking his way across the obstacle course of his morning, and wondered if anyone would notice if he just went back to bed. He could make a fort out of the duvet and no one would ever be allowed to bother him. After murdering Tony and leaving him in the washing machine or something, of course.

“If you kill me, you’ll have to get a new landlord. And I bet they wouldn’t let you keep the cat,” Tony said absently, his attention already back on the hapless circuit board he was torturing. Narfi, traitorous wretch, nudged Tony’s hand on the basis there might be Doritos in there. It wasn’t a bad shout, really. Narfi inexplicably liked Doritos, and Loki wondered if it was because he was ginger, and thought perhaps they might boost his colour or something.

Loki aimed a kick at Tony but without any real malice, mainly because he was probably right about the cat. Tony owned the house. Technically, Loki rented a room and half the couch. Tony had been oddly specific about that but entirely vague about everything else. Loki had tried setting up a rent book when he first moved in, but Tony had studiously ignored it. Loki had tried putting it on top of Tony’s current project. Tony had turned it into something that was apparently essential for the working of the little engine he’d made, and refused to discuss the matter. A few weeks later Tony dropped a handful of bills on him, asking what Loki thought about them, and whether it was some sort of mad British thing to bother your customers like this. Loki had looked through them, and thought Tony was lucky to have been able to enjoy a hot shower that morning. So he’d gone to the bank and set up an account for bills. Then he’d drawn the account number on Tony’s work-bench with black marker pen. Tony had got the message.

 

Loki took his time in the shower, seeing it as more a transitioning phase between blissful slumber and facing the vagaries of a cruel world than a way of getting clean. It was hot, which meant he’d got in before Tony (and that the bills had been paid). He shaved in the mirror he’d glued to the shower wall for that reason, and carefully tidied his hair in the mirror over the sink, combing it back off his face, and smoothing down the unfairly rampant curls. This, at least, proved he wasn’t a zombie. Zombies never made sure they didn’t look like Boffo the Clown before leaving the house. He found a shirt that didn’t need dry-cleaning as much as the rest, took one last longing look at his bed, and went downstairs.

Tony had managed to make coffee, of which Loki poured himself a generous cup. Tony’s coffee was probably the only reason Loki hadn’t buried the irritating little man and his ridiculous goatee in Hampstead Heath. It must be an American thing, he mused as he opened the fridge, since most people he’d met in Britain just used Nescafe, which tasted like mud that really wished it was coffee. He looked in the fridge, and rolled his eyes, banging the door shut again.

“Why don’t you ever buy milk?” He took a proper look at his housemate, wrinkling his nose. Tony had a Black Sabbath t-shirt, and in honour of the house rule of ‘not seeing anyone’s junk but your own,' baggy boxer shorts. “Or wear trousers?”

“Trousers slow the flow of blood to the brain, thus diminishing mental capabilities. The cat agrees,” Tony said, wisely. “And milk’s gross, man. You know where it comes from, right?”

“Narfi would agree with Mussolini if he thought there might be tuna." Loki pulled the cat food down from the top of the fridge and filled a small bowl with it. "Anyway, you eat ice-cream. How do you think that starts out?” He put the plate of cat-food on the floor for Narfi, who purred appreciatively, even though it wasn’t tuna. 

“That’s because ice-cream is delicious.” 

Tony opened the freezer and scooped some into his mug before passing it to Loki, who checked it was vanilla before digging in. Tony wasn’t as discriminating as most would be about what went into his coffee, and you only have to add black forest ice-cream to hot coffee once to realise it is far too acquired a taste for eight am on a Wednesday morning. Leaving Loki to put the ice-cream back in its place, Tony crouched in front of the TV to turn on the DVD player, and then flung himself onto the sofa, crossing his legs and sticking his face in the pile of ice-cream in his mug.

Loki followed him, idly. “What are you watching with the curtains drawn, on this beautiful sunny day?” 

He looked towards the window to emphasise his point, but it was raining. Again. Loki had noticed that about London. One day the Thames was just going to rise up and claim the unrighteous. Loki wondered vaguely where his life vest was. Probably being an essential component of the robot army or whatever it was Tony was building.

“ _Pie Crust,_ " said Tony fished about the sofa cushions for the remote. "According to my sources, it won a bunch of awards...” He frowned, and started pulling cushions off the sofa, scrabbling about like some sort of mad American rodent. Maybe a raccoon? Was that a rodent? A cushion flew past Loki, and the cat yowled in the kitchen. Loki, for his part, unperturbedly strolled into the lounge and picked up the remote from the high shelf he’d hidden it on the last time Tony had repaired it. Or was it from the time Tony had eaten the last of the bread and not told him? Tony took the remote, and continued like he hadn’t just demolished the living room. 

“...And of course, it features the divine Miss Darcy Lewis.”

“You’ve been going to that gay bar in Soho again,” Loki said accusingly, leaning on the back of the sofa as the credits came up. 

Tony shrugged. “Hey, it does really good cocktails. And it’s nothing to do with that. Look at her. Even Venus’d take one look at her and hang up her bow.”

“Cupid’s the one with the bow,” Loki said, absently. 

“Whatever. One of the guys at the junkyard said she totally shows her boobs in this, like, total full-frontal. I just wish the screen was bigger.” Tony didn’t look round from the fifty-inch television. He was eating Doritos with one hand and holding a couple of wires up to the light. Narfi hopped up and put his nose in the Doritos bag. “Anyway, don’t you have work?”

“I suppose...” Loki sighed. On-screen, Darcy Lewis was taking a batch of cookies out of the oven in a mini-skirt. The camera rolled up her legs and lingered over her cookies.

On the couch, Tony said, almost absently, “Oh yeah... Who’s your daddy?”

“Save me from your critical analysis.” Loki rolled his eyes and pushed away from the couch. “What’s this film supposed to be about anyway?”

“I dunno, some chick thing. Look at that...” Tony’s wave took in Darcy Lewis, looking winsome at a window. 

“Looks like clap-trap to me.” Loki finished his coffee, watching the movie out of one corner of his eye.

“Snob.” Tony petted Narfi, who was chewing a Dorito in mindless contentment. If it wasn’t for the fact that Narfi was an amoral feedbag with absolutely no conscience when it came to treats, Loki would almost think the cat liked Tony better.

Well, that was a depressing thought.

Loki clunked his mug into the sink. “I’m going to work.”

 

~*~

Loki and his brother had received hefty trust-funds when they had graduated. Loki had spent his on the book-shop, on the basis he liked books, and he liked finding interesting books and then reading them, and he didn’t fancy the years of children’s parties that pursuing a career in magic would entail. Also, he met David Blaine one time and it had been massively disappointing. His book-shop had started out as a clothes-shop, but Loki couldn’t stand the thought of dealing with cheap material and the sort of twittering idiot that could spend hours in a clothes-shop. So he’d thrown out the dummies and given the clothes hangers to a man who wanted to turn them into some sort of statement on modern life. Presumably annoyance at the way he never had enough coat-hangers for all his clothes. He had then spent a pleasant couple of days with Natasha, who had been on leave at the time, turning it into a bookshop. Loki had a very definite idea of what would made a good shop, so they’d put shelves up everywhere, and then painted the bits of wall left with forest green paint. And then he’d realised he’d meant to strip the floor first, so they’d pulled up the chic lino where they could on the basis it was chic lino and deserved no better, and spent a whole day sanding the floor boards. You couldn’t notice the old flooring unless you looked quite hard at the bottom of some of the shelves, and anyway Loki had put in some Oriental rugs to cover it up. He’d ordered in some books, and Natasha’s husband Steve had painted a hanging sign over the door. It said ‘Bifröst Books _Be transported_ **New, Used, and Rare Books Bought And Sold** ’ in old-fashioned writing, complete with slightly peeling gold leaf. 

Two weeks in, he’d realised how much owning a bookshop actually meant dealing with the general public, so he’d hired Bruce, who also rented the two rooms and bathroom over the shop. He also got up in the mornings so Loki didn’t have to. To look at Bruce was to think of teddy-bears and puppies, and he read Stephen Hawking for fun. Loki had been about to fire him on principle, when the _Luminia_ series had hit the shelves. The Luminia books comprised of four novels: _Luminia Rising_ , _Luminia Cresting_ , _Luminia Eclipse_ , and _Luminia Full_. The main character, Luminia Blue, despite her self-pronounced average intellect and below-average looks (although Loki could never see how black hair and green eyes could be that much of a disadvantage), managed to save the world, whilst deciding on the affections of her best friend, the hero and the evil overlord. For some reason, she chose the hero, despite his schizophrenic attitude towards her that of course, she changed with the power of love. Or something. Loki had thrown the first book across the room after the fifth description of the hero’s eyes as ‘melting chocolate’. He would have banned the whole damned series as an offence to pretty much everything he could think of, but Bruce had pointed out the alternate view, which was to embrace the juggernaut franchise, which by then included spin-off books, blockbuster movies, merchandise from keyrings to t-shirts, and a fanbase that alternated and combined hemorrhaging money with eating its own face. One way, Bruce pointed out in a reasonable voice, involved keeping literary integrity against a rise of talentless dreck. The other way involved making so much money that he would be able to buy a kettle that actually worked without having to initiate people into the too mysterious fork method, a whole bunch of interesting rare books Loki had looked at and sulkily rejected for being too expensive, and a small raise for his deserving assistant for dealing with the aforementioned fanbase so he didn’t have to. Bruce had stayed.

Bruce was tidying shelves when Loki came in and grunted at him in greeting, going into the back room to make a cup of tea. He neatly avoided Hector the Hanging God of Retail, a chipped and elderly shop dummy Loki had missed during renovations, and deified the third day of the shop being open, on the basis that if there was a god for suffering retailers, he would almost certainly be hanged for being rubbish at it. The back room was also where mail, parcels, and the laptop he’d rescued from Tony in a fit of humanitarianism after his last one had finally popped its ancient clogs all lived on a rickety old desk. 

He made tea for them both, and sat down on the tall stool behind the scarred desk that served as a counter. The oak desk was battered, and had in a previous life, belonged to a young miscreant called ‘Fforbes’. Loki knew because he’d carved ‘FFORBES THE FUK KING’ under the blotter, and found an elderly collection of seventies porn hidden under a forgotten Latin primer in the bottom drawer. He ignored the till, and pulled out a book from the bottom of one of the piles. The pile collapsed. Loki glared at the abuses he suffered at the hands of elementary physics and shuffled the piles about till they weren’t going to fall off the desk, because Bruce was really definite about such things, and anyway, it made the place look untidy.

“Remember, you have to be nice to customers today,” Bruce told him as he opened the till for the day.

“Why?” Loki didn’t look up from his book.

“Because you promised. And because I’ve spent all week being nice to them so they’ll come back, and you’re not going to ruin it.” He put the piles of books into order, whisking some of them away to shelve them, and sticking a few others in the decorative bookends Loki’s brother had bought him. One time, Bruce had gone on holiday, and it had been _terrible_.

“I never promised any such thing.” Loki looked over his book in outrage. 

“Yes you did.” Bruce held up a crumpled envelope with Loki’s handwriting on it. “You wrote and I quote ‘If you are nice to the puling idiots for an entire week, I will be nice to them for one day, including the ones who want _Lumina_ books.’ And you signed it.”

“It’s a forgery.”

Bruce stared at him, arms folded. It wasn’t an unfriendly stare, as such. Just... A stare.

“Tell you what," Loki said, making a show of turning the page of his book. "You deal with the customers then. I’ll just sit here in case of emergencies.” 

Bruce put the paper back in his shirt pocket. Loki considered going back to bed. He could just make a nest of packing material and hide under the desk.

 

In the end, Loki was true to his word, and sat reading his book. Most people seemed to gravitate towards Bruce anyway. It didn’t bother Loki. If they wanted to ask Winnie-the-Pooh’s cuddlier brother for facetious advice about books with no more intellectual content than a Big-Mac, that was their loss. He licked a finger, turned the page, and a shadow fell over him, causing him to look up irritably. Surely the average customer would know better than to bother someone who was clearly busy. The shadow belonged to a middle-aged business-suit type of person. Loki hated him on principle.

“Do you have any first editions?”

Loki looked at the man slowly, and then cast his eyes towards the glass-fronted cabinet beside him. It had a large-ish piece of card stuck in the glass that said ‘First Editions and Rare Books’ in Steve’s best handwriting. Loki opened his mouth to say ‘no’, but Bruce caught his eye from where he was explaining patiently to a young girl that they didn’t stock self-help books, because Loki was of the opinion that self-help was the sort of unhelpful that gave twaddle a bad name. Except more diplomatically. He tapped his shirt pocket significantly, and went back to smiling at his own customer. Loki glared at him, but when he looked back round, the businessman was still there, so Loki put on a professional smile.

“Were you thinking of anything in particular?” he said it through the professional smile, and the business suit took a mildly alarmed step back.

“Does it matter? Something British, I suppose. It’s for someone from our Japanese office.” 

Loki stared at him, with a patient air he’d picked up from Narfi. It meant, ‘Oh, you have a Japanese office? How does this affect your ability to feed me tuna?’ Or, in this case, be a pretentious bore that he was going to have to sell an undeserving book to, although that was less snappy, and of course, less relevant to the cat. Bruce cleared his throat meaningfully. 

“Well, I have Jane Eyre in three volumes...” Loki began reluctantly.

The business-man pulled a face. “Isn’t that a girl’s book? Have you got any Shakespeare?”

“A first edition of Shakespeare’s plays?” Loki raised his eyebrows. Bruce cleared his throat again, but in a way that meant he knew it was no good. The business suit obviously deserved everything he got. Loki mentally cracked his knuckles. Right then. “Would you like those signed, as well?”

The business-type suddenly looked excited.

“Why, do you have some?”

“...I think you should just leave. Go on. Shoo.” Loki made a flapping motion with his hand. Really, sometimes it wasn’t even worth the withering glance.

“Leave? But I was going to—” Business-type blustered.

“I’m sure you were, but I don’t want you to. Go. Away.” Loki stood up, pulling up every inch of his height to tower over the man in front of him. 

“I demand to talk to your manager!” Business-type said loudly, as if his voice might be heard in the back of the shop.

“Ah, one moment.” Loki smiled, and half turned away and then back, putting his hands together in an ingratiating way. “Can I help you?”

The business-type turned and stomped out of the shop, slamming the door so hard the Open/Shut sign fluttered. Loki gave Bruce a satisfied smile and sat back on his stool. Bruce sighed.

 

~*~

At eleven Bruce stood by the shop door jangling his small change.

“Anything from the shop?” he asked, counting it and replacing it, carefully.

“Coffee.” Loki grunted, not looking up.

“But the café isn’t—”

“Coffee!” Loki glared up at him and thumped the desk.

“Fine, fine.” Bruce rolled his eyes and left. Loki went back to his book, and when the shop bell jangled, he didn’t bother to look up.

“Um, hello?” Young, female, American. Loki sighed. A satanic triumvirate. And Bruce wasn’t even here. Maybe he could come up with a protective circle to activate when Bruce wasn’t in the shop. It could be made of barbed wire and electricity.

“No, we don’t carry _Luminia Rising_. We will never carry _Luminia Rising_ , except possibly on a spike to use it as the torch in a Wickerman-style bonfire of—” If people weren’t bright enough to look about two inches from the door where there was a window display and everything, they didn’t deserve to read. He finally looked up. “…Oh.”

Loki was rarely lost for words. In fact, he couldn’t remember the last time he hadn’t had an appropriate rejoinder for someone else’s stupidity, even when they didn’t deserve the effort of his dazzling wit. So the current state of pole-axed silence was an unusual phenomenon. The girl in front of him was shortish, with longish brown hair and black-rimmed glasses. Loki had last seen her wearing a mini-skirt, and it wasn’t so much that he’d never met a famous person before, it was more that he rarely met famous people that a normal person might have heard of, as evidenced by his housemate’s rather crass attempt at movie criticism. Finally, Loki’s brain realised that he was staring like a stunned mullet, and kicked a few synapses into gear.

“Aren’t you…?” He managed.

“Yes.” Darcy Lewis said. “I must admit, I was wondering how long it would take me to come across the famous British customer service.” She smiled at him. “Don’t worry. I’m not here for _Luminia Rising_. I just came in for some books on Shakespeare’s history plays. A guy I work with said you were pretty good for critical texts, but he told me about some other places as well. You know, if I’m bothering you.”

“Really?” Loki raised his eyebrows. Darcy Lewis’s last movie had been artsy piece of fluff about a girl who wanted to run a patisserie, in which she apparently showed ‘like, total full-frontal’. He opened his mouth to point this out and closed it again. Darcy Lewis was looking right at him with her chin up and a glint in her eye. He felt all pole-axed again, which wasn’t unpleasant per se, but it still seemed safest to retreat to what he knew. He gave her his best professional smile. She blinked, looking alarmed for a moment.

“Well, they’re all over here…” Loki lead her over to the relevant shelf. “The commentaries in this edition aren’t a complete waste of paper…”

“I’ve read these ones. You’re right, but I want to read for Lady Anne.” Darcy said, dismissively. “Why do the British always assume we can’t read?”

“Would you like me to answer chronologically or alphabetically?” Loki pulled another book out. He was sure that there was one in here that would be useful. He remembered shelving it...

Darcy Lewis raised an eyebrow. Behind her someone sloped in, and Loki watched him in the mirror over his desk absently.

“You really think Americans don’t read?”

“I saw _Shrew Tamer_ last week. It was poorly-written ephemera that proved if the writers had ever been shown the play they had done so with paper-bags over their head.”

“I’m in that one.” Darcy Lewis pointed out.

“Ah.” For the second time in as many minutes, Loki couldn’t think of a thing to say. Irritably, he realised he was staring like an idiot with a book in his hand. It wasn’t so much the fact that a pretty girl was looking at him, pretty girls had been known to look at him before, and might even do so again, but there was something about the direct gaze that was... Waiting to be impressed. He wasn’t sure he liked it.

“Well, I can’t help it if all the movies to come out of America are the same,” he proffered the book. Darcy took it but didn’t drop her gaze. 

“Are you really going to start this discussion with me?” She looked down at the cover, and actually looked slightly impressed. Loki was irritated to find that he wanted to keep impressing her.

“I don’t see how there can be any discussion really. I can win with one title,” he said, loftily, still watching the scruffy man in the black suit in the mirror over her shoulder. Him again. How many times?

“Oh?”

“ _Transformers 2_.”

“That movie was a lot of fun to shoot.” Darcy protested. Loki stopped looking down his nose and decided that Bruce really couldn’t hold this one against him. The woman had been in everything, and Loki wasn’t a Magic 8 Ball; he couldn’t know everything. He only knew about useful things, like Shakespeare and things. He cast a look to the door of the store room. _Oh horrendously hanged Hector, intercede for this your humble follower in whatever the hell I’m doing with my life..._

Hector heard.

“Excuse me.” Loki’s hand shot out and snagged the collar of the man in the black suit as he tried to slip past. “You haven’t paid for those. Put them down and go back to your own bookshop.”

“I don’t know what you mean.” The man slurred Irishly, struggling in Loki’s iron grip.

“Yes, you do. Give them back, and I’ll let you go.” Loki looked over at Darcy Lewis and tried another professional smile. “I’ll be with you in a minute.”

“No problem.” Darcy Lewis flipped through the book. The shop-lifter stopped struggling and stared.

“Is that…?”

“Yes…” Darcy Lewis sighed. 

“Hello. I’m Bernard. I’m a huge fan.” The shop-lifter smiled. “I loved that one about the giant robots...”

“Everyone does...” Darcy closed the book, in a gesture Loki (and by extension, Tony, Bruce, his brother, the cat...) recognised very well. It meant ‘All I wanted was to sit and read, and now there’s you’. Bernard was giving Darcy a shiny eyed look of adoration, trying to slick down his hair with one hand, whilst holding onto the books under his jacket with another. 

“Can I have your autograph?” he asked, evidently going for guileless Irish charm, something only ruined by the fact that his smile looked like it had never been used before. At least, not by him.

“I feel like we’re getting off-topic here.” Loki snapped.

Bruce came in, bearing two steaming paper cups. He carefully put them down on the desk and took in the tableau, when Loki felt it should be perfectly clear what was going on. It wasn’t like he typically held customers by the scruff of their neck.

Well, not often.

“What’s going on?” Bruce asked, pushing his glasses up his nose, amicably.

“He won’t pay for his books. Again.” Loki explained. Bernard twisted out of his grasp and turned back to Bruce.

“I told him I already paid for them.” Bernard said, but he suddenly looked hunted. “Wait, I remember this place—”

Bruce grabbed Bernard’s arm.

“Put the books down,” he suggested.

“Ow! Let go. I don’t know what you’re—”

“Put them down.”

“You can’t—”

Bruce picked Bernard up by his collar, and shook him by the throat till the books fell out of his jacket. Then he dragged the much taller Bernard out by his lapels and introduced his face to the concrete. Loki let him do it twice before tugging carefully on Bruce’s arm.

“Bruce.”

Bruce blinked and looked down at the thief, who was moaning on the pavement. “Oh. I did it again, didn’t I?”

“Yes, but only twice this time.” Loki patted his arm, in what was supposed to be a soothing manner. Maybe it was.

The would-be shop-lifter scrambled upright and tore off down the road. When they went back in, Darcy Lewis had left, leaving the books she had been holding in a neat little pile on the desk. Loki sighed without being entirely sure why, and picked up his coffee.

“When I came in, were you actually helping a customer?” Bruce went to sit on the stool. Loki smacked him, but not hard, because the next head making friends with the pavement could have been? his.

“Off. You know the rule.” He slapped at him again. Bruce fended off the blows and got off the stool. Loki sat down. Order was restored. Loki had spent a quiet day carving 'For the boss only' on the wooden seat, but Bruce liked to deliberately misunderstand who the boss was. Loki had also tried carving America-deflecting runes on the desk, but had scraped them off when the paperwork had finally grown sentience and made a suicide bid for the floor. 

“Anyway, don’t sound so surprised. I always help customers.” Loki took the lid off his coffee and took a sip. He made a face.

“Where did you get this?”

“The new place. You never help the customers. You just sit there and scowl over your book.” Bruce pointed out, perching on the desk.

“I only scowl when they’re stupid.” Loki sipped more coffee. It tasted like it had been strained through an old sock.

“Or boring, or badly dressed…” 

“You know, I can fire you any time I want. I effectively own you,” Loki reminded him. He took another mouthful of the coffee. “You know, this really is terrible.”

“Stop drinking it then.” Bruce rolled his eyes.

There was a moment of silence where Loki drank more of the vile sludge. He thought it might be giving him a stroke or something, it was that bad. He wasn’t going to complain though. Never let it be said he was one for pointless whining, even when presented with something that was clearly meant to poison right-thinking men. He could feel all the blood draining out of his right-side in horror. He was going to spend the rest of his life curled up as a hunchback with hideous internal deformities — the type they put in a jar. He keeled over to one side as his intestines bubbled.

“Fine. You’ve made your point. I won’t go to the new place again.” Bruce threw his hands up.

“Good.” Loki settled back on his stool. 

“So was she pretty?” Bruce turned his paper cup around in his hands.

“Who?” Loki didn’t look up.

“The customer.”

“Which customer?” Loki reflected that Bruce could be really irritating. He should just fire him.

“Ah, she was, was she? Did you get her number?”

Loki didn’t even bother to reply. Vex-A-Lot Bear kept talking anyway.

“I thought not. Did you do your professional smile at her?”

“…No.” Loki muttered, hunching over his book.

“Oh dear. Well, better luck next time.” Bruce said, sympathetically. Loki sniffed, and went back to his book.

 

~*~

The sandwich shop was well used to Loki’s odd American assistant, and barely raised an eyebrow at the request for cheese on a BLT. Loki had tried pointing out to Bruce that it was called a BLT, not a BLCT, but Bruce had just given him his ‘gee whiz’ face till he had gone away again. The sandwich-maker was tall with dark hair, and gave off an air that he was in his dressing-gown and pyjamas, even whilst wearing a serviceable button-down shirt and a clean white apron. His teenage daughter smiled at Loki from her constant spot behind the counter and fiddled with a lock of hair. Loki smiled back in a bemused way, and she giggled and whipped out her phone. Loki wondered what had just happened and was about to ask when her father put two sandwiches in front of him. Loki tried not to drool at the smell of hot bacon and tomato sauce and paid up. 

“Bye,” his daughter said, over her phone.

“Er, bye,” Loki replied. Somehow this too was a great cause for amusement and a flurry of activity over the phone.

Outside Loki paused to unwrap his sandwich and take a blissful bite. He hadn’t realised how hungry he was. Whatever Tony might believe, ice-cream and coffee was not breakfast. He started walking back to the shop, feeling a little more optimistic about his day. There was bacon and ketchup, and the sandwich-maker’s daughter proved the lunacy of all women…

And then he walked slap-bang into someone, smearing god’s gift to hungry men all down the other person’s front.

“Oh damn…” Loki dragged out a large white handkerchief and dabbed at the other person’s lapel.

“Get the hell off me! What is your major malfunction?” Darcy Lewis glared up at him, recognised him and managed to find some extra anger somewhere. Loki was impressed, you didn’t see those sort of rage reserves often. “You again?”

“I didn’t see you. You’re too short!” Loki protested, looking down at his sandwich, now looking sad as only a collapsed sandwich can on the pavement between them.

“Great, first my movies, then my jacket. Are you just a nightmare sent from the BBC or something?” Darcy dropped her shopping bags to snatch his handkerchief and scrub at her jacket and top. There wasn’t nearly enough hankie and far too much sauce.

“Look, don’t get shirty. You ruined my sandwich.”

Darcy gave him a look over her glasses. “Shirty? Really? Was that a pun, or did you genuinely mean that? Answer carefully, because I really liked this jacket.”

Loki stared at her. He was starting to get quite irritated with this strange American girl.

“Look, come to my house,” he said, abruptly.

“What?” Darcy Lewis stopped looking amused.

“You can change.” Loki tried to look harmless. “I live literally across the street. And you can’t walk around like that. You look like a lunatic that lost it’s carer.”

“You really know how to compliment a girl…” Darcy looked around. “Where is ‘literally across the street’?”

Loki pointed at the green door across the street. “There.”

Darcy stared at him, and then back down at her sky-blue and tomato-red-in-places jacket. “…Fine. But I have a taser.” She scrambled in her bag, presumably for the taser, and Loki sighed and picked up her bags. At least that way she was more likely to follow. He briefly wondered if he should get a leash for events such as this. Was that weird? Probably. He led the way across the street and even opened the door for her.

He instantly regretted it. For one thing, he’d meant to get round to finishing the kitchen. Or getting Tony to finish it. The current patchwork of tiles and randomly selected wall paint couldn’t be called arty by even the most desperately pretentious students. At least the living-room was still beige. Mostly.

“My housemate…” he began.

“Oh, don’t worry. You should have seen my college dorm.”

Loki shoved some motorbike parts aside and dodged ahead to try and do something about the car engine on the dining-room table. On his way past, he tried to shut the microwave door, which fell off.

“What happened to the microwave?” Darcy was looking around interestedly.

“It was very bad and had to be punished. The bathroom is upstairs on the left.” Loki pointed up the stairs, and she went up them with only the slightest hint of trepidation, picking her way around the ruined corpse of a magic bullet blender. Left alone, Loki plucked at his shirt, which had tried to save his sandwich on its way to the pavement, and sighed. He’d liked his shirt, and was well aware he was down to two clean shirts. One was a ghastly paisley throwback that Tony had bought him and a powder-pink thing more suited to someone his brother’s size. He glared at the washing-machine. It continued to look as innocent as anything that had made a mysterious clunk and then promptly stopped working could look. He looked for the kettle in the hope of at least performing the most basic social function, and found out that Tony had taken it apart in the night. Loki growled. The first time he’d brought a girl back since—well, ever, and the kettle didn’t even have the grace to be in one piece—

“Everything alright?” Darcy had changed into a denim house-dress and a chunky-knit red cardi. Loki tried to stand in front of the kitchen sink, which had never been the same since that time with the paint.

“Fine, yes. I was going to offer you tea but my housemate happened to the kettle.”

“Oh, it’s alright.” Darcy sat on the stairs to pull her shoes on. Loki realised, with a slight sinking feeling, that actually, he didn’t want her to leave.

“Well, I can make coffee,” he darted between her and the door. “Or there’s some sort of eye-watering pop. My housemate drinks it.”

“No, I’m okay, really.” Darcy smiled at him piteously and Loki tried not to glower. Darcy raised her eyebrows. They were very expressive eyebrows, Loki noticed, and they made her eyes even bluer. He resolved not to notice anything else about her.

“I should go…” She picked up her shopping bags. Oh lord, had he been staring?

“Oh, right.” Loki saw her to the door. “It was good. Meeting you. Twice. I mean, surreal, but nice.”

“Thanks, I think.” They now stood opposite each other in the narrow hall. Loki’s brow furrowed as he looked at the door, even as he realised that probably trying to keep her here any longer was probably against a law or something…

“Can you open the door?” It sounded like she wasn’t sure he could.

“Oh, yes.” Loki suddenly had a bright idea. “Here.” He pulled a paper flower from behind her ear. “An apology for the jacket.”

“…Right…” She took the flower, looking bemused. That seemed to be it. He opened the door, and Darcy stepped out into the bright street.

“Well, bye.” Loki let the door swing shut. “Pop? Who says pop after the age of seven?” he asked the picture of Julie Numar on the wall opposite. It didn’t answer. There was a knock on the door and he gave Julie Numar an apprehensive look before he opened it. Darcy Lewis stood there.

“Let me in for a moment.”

“Of course.” Loki stepped back, assuming, as all right-thinking people do, that Julie Numar had fallen on him in universal vengeance for the use of the word ‘pop’, and he was now in some sort of coma-dream. Maybe Tony would show up dressed as a lion or something.

“I meant to say thank you. For letting me use the bathroom.” Darcy smiled at him, and Loki actually found himself smiling back.

“No problem.”

And she kissed him. Simply and sweetly. “Thank you.”

And then she was gone again. Loki stared after her. He could still feel her lips on his, the way her hair had tickled against his cheek. It wasn’t as though he’d never been kissed before. Far from it, but there was a little part of him that— Tony barged the door open. Loki took his fingers down from his mouth hurriedly.

“You would not believe the day I had. Let me get changed and then we are going to discuss why women are exactly like cars.”

He disappeared for a moment and then poked his head back round the corner.

“Did I just see a girl?”

“No.” Loki plucked at his shirt irritably and started to unbutton it.

“I did, didn’t I? Don’t lie to me. Was she hot?” Tony was grinning in that spectacularly irritating way he had.

“Tony…”

“Did you score?” Tony drew out the word ‘score’.

“Tony!” Loki snapped, throwing his shirt in Tony’s face.

Tony ducked. “Are you wearing a beater? What are you, my grandpa? Did you like her?”

“It’s cold in the shop. The vest keeps me warm.” Loki went upstairs to find a different shirt, sweeping past Tony. Tony followed him, still cheerful.

“Ohhh… Loki, did you do magic at her?”

Loki slammed the door on Tony’s grin. He found the pink shirt and pulled it on, letting it billow out around him. He looked at himself in the wardrobe mirror, sighed, and opened the door again. Tony hadn’t moved, which wasn’t really a surprise. He took in Loki’s new clothing and raised his eyebrows.

“Does the gay circus know you stole one of their tents?”

“I wouldn’t have to wear it if you fixed the washing machine.” Loki rolled the sleeves up, pushing past him.

“That washing machine needs an honourable discharge and peaceful retirement to a veteran’s home in Florida.” Tony kept following him. “You’re so wound up. You need to get laid. Let me take you out.”

“I have to go back to work.” Loki picked up Bruce’s sandwich. It was cold. Maybe he wouldn’t notice. 

“Tonight then. Please? You’ll have fun.” Tony put himself between Loki and the door.

“Tony, move your obnoxious colonial arse before I make you move it.” Loki picked up a piece of kettle, threateningly.

“Easy on the colonial there, Ikea.”

“Ikea is Swedish!” Loki made to throw the kettle casing. “Move.”

“Hey’ it’s all the same—you break it you bought it!” Tony dodged the casing as it flew past him. “So that’s a yes on tonight then?”

Tony was still laughing when Loki slammed the door.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [This](http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-hK299eGLEyA/UC3ZHLeuwVI/AAAAAAAAB1I/DBc98CFyQk0/s640/boschcover.jpg) is the picture in Loki's bookshop.


	2. Chapter Two

Loki came home to a folded shirt on his bed and a note from Tony that said _’My mother thinks I’m made of flat-pack furniture or something so this should fit you. Pub after dinner. NO EXCUSES.’_ The shirt was a very dark-blue silk, and if it had really been picked out by Tony’s mother she had clearly never even met the man. Loki pulled it on. It fit pretty close to perfectly, proving that possibly Tony’s mother had not even been present at the birth. He was pulling the collar straight in the mirror when he heard Tony clattering around downstairs.

“Chiiiips, ‘ot chips. Git chor ‘ot chips ‘ere!” he carolled in an accent that would have made Dick Van Dyke wince. Loki came downstairs anyway.

“Don’t do that ever again.” He shuddered theatrically. 

Loki ate his chips standing behind the couch while Tony sat on the couch like Gollum and shoved food in his mouth. Between little ‘mm’ noises that made Loki want to shove his chip-fork up Tony’s nose, Tony mumbled, “There’s this pub just opened near Oxford Circus. We should go.”

“I don’t want to…” Loki looked at Tony, who was giving him big brown eyes over a mouthful of hot potato. It was disgusting. How the man ever managed to get so many girls (and he did), was beyond Loki.

“No.” Loki ate his chips decisively.

“Fine.” Tony pouted greasily. He chewed for a bit, and then said innocently, “That shirt looks good on you.”

Loki glared at the back of his head. The man was right, it did look good on him. Blast.

“Oh fine… Let’s go.”

 

~*~

The pub was admittedly perfect, Tony’s cracked genius apparently extending to finding the best places to drink and meet people. Loki settled in at the bar with a glass of beer. Tony had already managed to ingratiate himself (and a tray of shots) with a crowd of raucous students. Loki wondered, for a moment, what it would be like to be able to just integrate like that. After all, his brother never had any problems... A tall blonde girl tapped him on the shoulder, breaking his admittedly maudlin spiral into despair.

“Hi! Look, can you help me out? I’m trying to get away from the date from hell.”

Loki turned casually, taking in the room. He was looking for someone who could be a date from hell, so sitting at a table, probably with a terrible shirt on... Ah. “Is he the tall bland-looking one?”

She cut her eyes to where he was looking, at a sweaty little man with a floral shirt that James May would have rejected as too ‘cool dad’. “Yes. Total bore. He’s called me and his car Baby-doll.”

Loki’s lip curled. “Sounds awful. Can he see us?”

“No, you’re hidden by the pot-plant.” The blonde grinned mischievously. “My name’s Charlotte.”

“I’ll meet you over there.” Loki turned back to the bar and finished his drink in a leisurely way. Then he put on his coat and draped his scarf round his neck, so that he looked vaguely arty. Maybe a failed actor or something. Charlotte had taken her place at the table, and Loki grimaced at the obvious way her date’s eyes dragged down her. He could just imagine the sweaty-palmed little tit’s single brain-cell working overtime trying to come up with ways to impress her. What people never seemed to understand, he thought as he stretched idly and started over to the table, was that you don’t need to ‘come up’ with anything.

Well, mostly.

“Charlotte?” Loki stood over the table, glaring at them both. “You told me you had a class tonight!”

“Honey, I…” Charlotte protested. Loki drew himself up imperiously. The little twerp was already wilting in his crumpled shirt. Good.

“No, I’ve had enough!” Loki cut his hands in a flourishing X. “Always an excuse from you! And now I find you cavorting in bars like some floozy!”

Charlotte looked like she might be about to cry, face buried in her hands and shoulders shaking. Loki’s chin trembled and he swept his scarf over his shoulder. “We are through you—you painted Jezebel! You hear me?”

It took Charlotte a few goes to calm down enough to sob “Honey, don’t, please…” She grabbed her bag and coat.

“Never! You’ve cuckolded me for the last time!” And the he stalked off with a rather good sweep of his coat, Charlotte following behind, hiding her face and apparently sobbing with guilt.

Outside, Loki leant against a wall, laughing. Charlotte held onto him, giggling helplessly. It was rather nice.

“Did you see his face? I still can’t believe you called me a Jezebel. Who talks like that?” She wiped her eyes. Loki grinned down at her.

“Well, you certainly deserve a drink.” Charlotte curled her fingers into the wool of his jacket and pressed against him in a subtly different way. Loki’s grin became lazier, more cat that got the cream than trickster. 

Charlotte licked a corner of her mouth. “I have a bottle of white wine in the fridge. What do you think?”

Loki smiled. Finally, something good about today. “Lead on, Jezebel.”

 

~*~

Loki slammed the door open. “Tony? Tony!”

“Uh oh.” Tony dropped the newly-dismantled kettle guiltily.

“Don’t hide behind the sofa.” Loki stalked into the room, trailing rage like a cloak.

“Works for the Daleks.” Tony put his head up, cautiously. 

Loki, unimpressed by the meerkat impression, folded his arms and death-stared till Tony’s hair started to smoke. “I just got a call from my brother at work to ask why I wasn’t returning his calls. Apparently he left several messages with you.”

“Oh yeah, he did.” Tony relaxed. “Jeez, I thought for a moment you’d found…” He trailed off at the look on Loki’s face. “Never mind. Look, I can’t go around remembering messages for you. You should just be home to take the call. What happened to your mobile, anyway?”

“That’s not the point!” Loki’s last phone had been unfortunately dropped down a drain after a client had phoned for the fifth time that day for a book Loki did not in fact have. This did not make Loki feel better. He pointed a finger that vibrated with outrage. “There is pencil and paper by the damn phone, you half-witted excuse for a shaved monkey.”

“Hey, less of the monkey. I’m sorry, okay?” Tony hopped over the back of the couch and sat down. “What did you brother want, anyway?”

“He wanted to know why I wasn’t returning his calls. Again.” Loki sneered into the fridge.

“Yeah, alright alright, I get it.” Tony picked up his screwdriver and there was a moment of sulky silence. Loki looked in a cupboard, and then back in the fridge. Still nothing.

Tony interrupted his circuit back to the cupboard. “Oh, while we’re on the subject, you did get a call this morning.”

“Oh?” Loki sighed and continued back to the cupboard. Maybe he could bully Bruce into buying lunch today. After all, he had to save up for a new phone.

“Some American girl. I couldn’t tell if she was loony tunes or if you’d given her your number though…”

“What was her name?” Loki spun round.

“Er, Danielle? Dara? Dora? Why?”

“Darcy?” Loki really hoped he didn’t look as shocked as he’d felt. Of course, he’d not given Darcy Lewis and her challenging look or her smart, beautiful mouth a thought since she’d left his house a few days before. Of course. Never a moment to consider that brown hair flying round her face, or how it would look spread across a pillow... Blue eyes staring up at him...

“Don’t you know what she wanted?” Tony asked finally.

“Huh? Oh, yes, what did she want?” Loki snapped out of what was threatening to be a very involved reverie involving cookies, which was weird because that had never happened to him before. Ever. Not even twice that morning.

“I dunno man, Jeremy Kyle was on… Okay, okay!” Tony dodged round the sofa again as Loki advanced. “She said call her at the Ritz, but she gave a different name.”

“What was it?” Loki’s stalked towards him, hefting what was probably an electrical… Thing threateningly.

“I don’t remember I swear!” Tony put his hands over his head. “It was a cartoon character _Not the face!_ ”

“Can you remember which one?” Loki loomed over the puny American, swinging his impromptu weapon by the plug.

“No! Look, just call the Ritz. And stop threatening me with the toaster. Fucking Swedish luna—” 

Loki threw the thing at him with a clatter, and Tony curled into a ball as it flew past him.

 

-*-

Five minutes later Loki was on the phone to the Ritz, glaring at Tony and growling into the phone, “No, I don’t know which cartoon character, but how many cartoon characters can you have on?” 

“You’d be amazed.” The concierge drawled. Loki ground his teeth. He could practically feel the concierge’s disdain dripping into his ear. This was all Tony’s fault, and Loki had already decided he would make an excellent skull with geraniums in it. As Loki watched him lounging cross-legged on the couch, he thought maybe he could do something nice with his ribcage and climbing plants as well.

“Boo-boop-di-do…” Tony hummed to himself. Loki stared at his terrible, brilliant housemate as inspiration came to him. Thank god for Tony’s brief but intense obsession with the forties...

“Do you have Betty Boop on the books? Yes. Sorry, my housemate is a complete waste of space. I’m going to replace him with a pot-plant.”

“Hey, I resent that,” Tony said, mildly, looking up from his screwdriver for a moment.

“Shut it, fertiliser.” Loki snapped.

“Sir?” The concierge had that ‘can’t believe I’m paid to put up with you’ voice on. Loki recognised it, because he’d practically invented it, and he didn’t appreciate it being used against him. He imagined violets growing in the hollows of Tony’s spine till he felt better. 

“No, not you. Can you put me through please?”

On the couch, Tony the soon-to-be window-box muttered, “Just because this chick somehow got your panties in a twist…”

Loki decided to save on the window-box idea and just kill him. He always wound up killing his house-plants anyway, and at least this way he could get it done while he was on hold. The way to start was by tenderising the usable areas, surely. He reached out at Tony with his foot, since he was pretty sure they didn’t even have a meat tenderiser.

“Er, hello?” The concierge was gone, replaced by a woman. The woman, in fact. Darcy Lewis.

Loki stopped trying to kick Tony in the kidneys. “Hello?”

“Hey! I hope you don’t think it’s totally creepy I got your number, but you have a webpage. You should really update that, by the way. It’s total MySpace.” Darcy sounded cheery, and Loki smiled despite himself. He didn’t even want to kick Tony as much.

“That’s Bruce’s fault. He said he could set it up for free.” Narfi jumped up beside him and butted at Loki’s hand.

“Ah, blame the man with no power.” She paused. “Are you purring?”

“No, that’s the cat.” Loki poked Narfi in the face distractedly, and Narfi purred louder. Was petting your cat on the phone cool? She might just think he was a mad cat lady, except a man. Surely that was more tragic than a lady. Weren’t men supposed to just collect newspapers or something? 

“You have a cat? No way.” She sounded incredulous. In Loki’s opinion, that amount of incredulity was really uncalled for. It was like she thought he wasn’t capable of love or something.

“Why is that odd?”

“I just... Uh... Didn’t picture you as the animal type.”

“I have a housemate as well.” Loki pointed out, defensively.

“Oh, is he the guy I spoke to this morning?”

“Yes, he’s an idiot. I’m going to be killing him later. With a knife.” Loki said, without a hint of irony.

“Hey...” Tony objected. Loki ignored him, because plant-pots don’t get to have objections to anything.

“Really?”

“Yes, really. It’ll be best, really. Like a mercy killing, but not tragic at all.”

“I resent that,” Tony said, mildly.

“Shut it. You’re going to be a window box. Accept it,” Loki snapped.

Darcy laughed, and Loki found himself wishing his hair looked better, despite the fact that she couldn’t see him. “Well, I was going to ask you for tea, but if you’re busy...”

“No, I’m free. He’s not very tall. I can probably fit most of him in the freezer and work on it later.”

“Well, see you at five?”

“Yes. At the Ritz?” Loki tried very hard to make it sound like he arranged meetings at the Ritz all the time, just as a matter of course. People would phone him up and ask him to arrange meetings for them, he was so used to it. Yes, of course.

“I’ll meet you there.”

Loki hung up and tried not to look too pleased.

Tony grinned at him very cheerily for someone about to spend the rest of the day in the freezer. “Hey, Ikea got a date. Gonna show her how you put Tab A into Slot B—ow!”

 

~*~

That afternoon saw Loki standing in the foyer of the Ritz. He wasn’t nervous. It was warm in the hotel, that was all. Apparently rich people like to be warm. Nothing wrong with that. Right, yes. He stepped up to the desk at the same time as an exceptionally tall black man who regarded the concierge impassively. As they waited, the man slid his eyes to Loki in a way that suggested he could see right into Loki’s soul, carefully noting the bits he didn’t like for later. The odd golden colour of his eyes didn’t help. Loki looked down at the desk, determinedly not feeling ashamed for all the things the big man obviously couldn’t even know. He was busy squashing down that one time he’d told Thor there was no Father Christmas, when the concierge came back. The judgemental man (and it hadn’t been Loki’s fault about Jenkins in year seven. Jenkins should have realised that the cardboard box wasn’t load-bearing) turned his stare on the concierge, who didn’t even wilt, his smile remaining bright. The man was either very good at his job, or a complete idiot.

“Room 314,” the judgemental man rumbled, making Loki jump.

Loki blinked out out of a terrible reverie about the time he cut his then four year-old cousin Sif’s hair because she was cuter than him.

“…Me too.”

“Righto sirs, just sign here, and it’s the lift to your…” The concierge looked at his hands for a moment. “Right.” Ah, an idiot. That explained so much.

Loki signed his name and followed the other man across the foyer. They rode the lift in awkward silence, the big man standing at parade rest. Loki adjusted his jacket in his reflection in the lift door till he caught the other man watching him. After that, he concentrated on not letting the man gain access to his university years.

 

~*~

Room 314 turned out to be a suite of rooms, full of men and a few women milling about, nibbling at the buffet table and chatting in bright well-here-we-all-are tones. Loki blinked. Was this some sort of mad conspiracy? Maybe Darcy Lewis was well known for her habit of taking up with complete strangers, seducing them in their own home and then leaving… Loki shook his head. A kiss couldn’t really be a seduction. Not really. No matter what it felt like, it wasn’t like they’d had a passionate weekend together—

“Hi there. What’s your name?” A perky American girl smiled up at him. She had a bobbing blonde pony-tail with a sort of flouncy shirt thing and a big smile, carefully painted a neutral tone to make her look professionally harmless. Loki treated her to a smile of his own; not the professional one, but the one that he usually used in bars on girls wearing classily low-cut tops and drinking classily alcoholic drinks.

“Loki Odinson.” Loki looked at her clipboard. She was taking names of people and publications, presumably in case of emergencies, like poison in the canapes.

“Super.” She scribbled on her paper. “Where are you from?”

“Iceland, but I grew up here.” Loki gave her an innocent smile, pitching it with the right hint of wickedness that meant she wouldn’t think too hard about it.

Predictably, her eyes widened and she giggled.

“Uh, wow. A Viking, huh?”

“Something like that.” Loki smiled, and she blushed in a most satisfying way. Really, sometimes it was far too easy.

“Well er, I actually meant which magazine are you...” She caught Loki’s eye for a moment, and then looked down, blushing again. “Er, from.”

“Oh, I’m free-lance. I don’t like to be uh… Tied down.” Loki gave her a moment to think over all possible meanings of the phrase ‘tied down’ and winked at her. She giggled again, and fumbled her pen.

“Say, I was thinking about doing an article on press junkets. You know, behind the scenes… Could I interview you?” Loki let his gaze linger on her mouth.

“I, uh…” she gulped.

“After work, obviously.” Loki backed off, still smiling. 

“Obviously…” she repeated, looking a little dazed. Someone across the room called ‘Patty!’ and the blonde blinked and scampered off. Loki smiled, triumphant. Maybe he even would take her out for dinner. When he turned round, his friend from the lift was watching him.

“You’d have done the same.” Loki muttered. It was absurd to feel guilty for distracting a bimbo with a clipboard and thinking about perhaps sleeping with her. Well, probably sleeping with her. The black man raised an eyebrow at him, and Loki strategically put some people between him and Mr Down-Right-Unsettling, taking a moment by the punch-bowl to regroup. Obviously Darcy had invited him personally, and all these other people were part of some publicity thing that had run over. Loki started to feel a bit foolish that he was worrying in the first place. He didn’t usually worry about girls. Take them out, leave them in; it was all much the same to him, for the most part. Darcy was different though, and that irritated him. He’d only met her once, and made an absolute tit of himself. Really, he should have just marked it up to bad experience and used the whole encounter as a drinking story. He reflected one could change it according to the audience, so he could wow say, Tony, with the fact that she was naked in his bathroom, and a sufficiently low-cut top (hopefully filled with the associated girl) with the fact she had been (mildly) impressed by his literary prowess. But that would be ultimately disappointing, like he’d let something go by. Loki wasn’t used to that. Not with women, anyway. 

“Why am I here?” he asked a tray of vol-au-vents. They didn’t answer, which was probably for the best.

“Uh… Mr Odinson?” It was the blonde clipboard girl.

“Yes?” Loki looked up sharply. He saw her expression and remembered himself, relaxing into a lazy smile. “Can I help you?”

“I—I got you onto the list. You can go through.” Blonde Clipboard Girl licked her lips, pushing out her chest. As Loki let his eyes wander, he wondered if Mr Down-Right-Unsettling was behind him again. He resisted the urge to turn round and instead tucked a lock of Blonde Clipboard Girl’s hair behind her ear, catching a whiff of her perfume. At least if the Darcy Lewis thing turned out to be signing a contract to say he’d never speak of smearing tomato sauce on her favourite jacket ever again, at least there’d be a consolation prize.

He took his hand down fast, smiling despite himself. “Thank you.”

Blonde Clipboard Girl led him down a small hallway. “You just rotate through the rooms.”

“Thanks for your help.” Loki smiled and touched her on the arm lingeringly, before slipping into the room indicated. There was a tall, blandly handsome man wearing a sort of casual suit and glasses sitting on a plush sofa. Loki smiled winningly.

“Oh, sorry. I’m actually looking for Miss Lewis. I have a message for her. From Pete.” Loki plucked a name he’d heard in the buffet-room.

The smile wilted a little, but the blandly handsome man still looked friendly. “Oh, right. Well, you got a little lost. Just go back out and turn right instead of left.”

“Oh, thanks. Sorry, first day and all that.” Loki said, cheerily baffled. “Love your work, by the way.” Who was he, anyway?

“Hey, thanks, man.” Loki shut the door politely and walked purposefully down the hall like any new person with a message from Pete would.

Loki had to try two doors before he found Darcy sitting in a sumptuous room on a plush sofa. In a sumptuous corner, a plush PA was shuffling paperwork and frowning about it.

“Hello, Miss Lewis.” Loki stuck out a hand as though they’d never met.

“Hello… Loki? Interesting name.” Darcy gave good poker face. Loki almost laughed at her serious workman’s expression. 

“Cruel parents.”

Darcy laughed, a tinkling social laugh that made Loki resolve to make her laugh properly as soon as he could. 

“Dara, would you please fetch me a cup of coffee?”

“Uh, sure.” The PA bustled off and Darcy sagged.

“God, I am so sorry, I thought this would all be done by now.” She stepped forward and kissed him, tugging him down by his lapels. For a moment Loki couldn’t move, although this was mainly because he was bent at an angle about two degrees from collapsing in a heap of limbs. He’d never known anything like it. Not since, well, ever. He realised what a fool he’d been for thinking about Blonde Clipboard Girl at all, and he really wasn’t thinking at all about his back going into knots because Darcy Lewis’s hand was curled into his lapels in just the best way. She made a little noise against him, and suddenly Loki could move again, one hand on her hip with the other in her hair, straightening up to bring her up on her tiptoes. Darcy made another little encouraging noise and then suddenly pulled back, leaping out of reach and smoothing her hair down with one hand.

“Right, good, and you know, space is such a good metaphor for that.”

Loki looked round. The PA put the coffee on the table and Loki wondered if he had red lipstick on his mouth.

“ _Empire_ magazine’s still waiting, Miss Lewis.” The PA looked from Loki and back to Darcy. Loki stood straight, adjusting his jacket like he’d been discussing the extended metaphor of the analogy or whatever it was free-lance journalists talked about, and not like he’d just been about to take Darcy Lewis and—

“Thanks Dara. Did you remember sugar this time?” Darcy peered into the cup theatrically and Dara slapped her forehead. 

Darcy waved her hand in _de nada_ gesture. “Can you fetch me some please?” Dara rushed out again.

“Look, I can’t really talk now,” Darcy said, apologetically, getting out a small hand-mirror to check her make-up. “Can we get dinner later?”

“Yes, of course.” Loki’s mouth said while the rest of his brain was kicking him, telling him to play it cool damnit and anyway—“Oh, no wait, I have my brother’s birthday dinner tonight.”

“Okay.”

“I mean—” Loki had a sudden image of everything just draining away before it even got started. If that happened he wouldn’t even bother with Clipboard Girl. He’d just go home and water his housemate window-box until he was dead and be found six weeks after he had been half-eaten by the cat.

“I’ll come to dinner with you. It’ll be fun.” Darcy tip-toed to pat his cheek and the PA came back in. Darcy stepped back whilst Loki touched his cheek where he could feel the ghosts of her fingers. Maybe he wouldn’t be eaten by the cat after all.

“But we could...”

Darcy smiled knowingly. “I have a bunch more interviews right now. But points for being keen.” 

“I don’t mind waiting...” He honestly didn’t, was the weird thing.

“Sorry, _Empire_ has the exclusive. You have to go.” She kissed him again, gently.

The PA came clattering back in like the world’s biggest cock-block.

“Got the sugar. And the guy from _Empire_ …”

“Yeah, show him in.” Darcy nodded at Loki. “I’ll call you.”

The PA looked confused. Loki sort of knew how she felt.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Firstly, can I say thank you so hard to everyone who's read and reviewed, it means a bunch, and I am sorry I am rubbish at replying to your comments. I read all of them and they warm the cockles of my heart. Also the mussels, which is actually a better pun when you think about it. 
> 
> Secondly, I'm sorry this bit is so short! But the next chapter will have Thor also cake. So there's that.


	3. Chapter Three

At precisely five past five, Thor bounded into the shop. Loki’s brother had always been the hail-fellow-well-met type, and reminded most people he met of a Viking accountant — big, blond, and wearing a suit. Loki was always put in mind of a one of those big yellow dogs that one usually sees at the park bounding away in a personal world of joy and slobber whilst the owner walks along behind in green wellies, alternating between yelling ‘Heel!’ and pretending that they own a different dog. Thor was still wearing his work clothes, a grey suit that probably cost more than the shop, and a badge that said ‘It’s my birthday!!!’ in big, tasteless bubble-writing; probably a gift from the myriad of giggling and interchangeable assistants Thor seemed to gather to him like minor Valkyries of accountancy. The image of affable corporate berserker was completed by the courier box he carried carefully.

“Nice suit,” Loki said in Icelandic, from where he was still filling out the big ledger that he used to keep track of his rare books. Apart from muttering rude things at customers and at Tony, talking to Thor was the only opportunity he got to talk a proper language since moving to England, and it seemed rude to let his mother-tongue die out because a people couldn’t be bothered to learn how to pronounce all the fly-specks above the vowels.

“I came from a meeting.” Thor looked down at himself, honest brow wrinkling. “Do you think I should change?”

Loki rolled his eyes. “Into what, exactly? You look fine. Just wait a moment, will you? I have to finish this.”

Loki went back to scribbling in the big ledger. Thor, because he was a man of action and a massive pain in the arse, wandered about, pulling books off the shelf seemingly at random and then replacing them with much the same decision-making process. Loki watched resignedly before turning back to his paperwork, trying to ignore his brother as he wandered past to the back room.

“Is Bruce here?” He peered about hopefully.

Maybe Loki could just tie him up outside the shop till he was ready to go. Thor would probably just stand with the collar and the leash all tied up to a drainpipe looking like the most abandoned in the puppy in the world. Like not only had someone left him there forever, but they’d also taken his favourite teddy-bear with them. And then someone would take pity on him and adopt him into a big house with his very own ball and a warm spot by the fire to curl up. Loki grimaced, and decided that probably he shouldn’t tie his brother up and leave him somewhere. People might talk. 

Besides, he had no rope. 

“No, he had to take the afternoon off. But he says he’ll see you next time you're in London.” Loki replied.

“Wonderful...” Thor’s voice echoed from the back room. “Oh, Loki...” He could practically hear Thor’s face fall. Loki winced. He should have distracted him with a chew toy or something.

“I don’t believe you still have this.” Thor was standing behind the one-way glass, and a little creak indicated Hector the Hanging God was being swung back and forth.

Loki sighed and set his pen down. “I told you, it’s my household god.”

“I’m not sure you could call this a household god.” Thor said, doubtfully. Which just showed how much he knew. Hector the Hanging God of Retail had sacrifices (donated by the lost property box) hung on him and everything. The only way he could be more godlike was if he came to life, although Loki had done his best with a pair of comedy giant Elton John glasses. 

“Well, I had to modernise him. They didn’t have bookshops back then.”

“I’m not sure you could call him modern either...” Which showed how much Thor knew. As evidenced by Tony on numerous occasions, a lack of trousers were as modern as you could get.

“Post-modern then?” Loki picked up his pen again.

“What is the reason for the troll doll?” Thor asked, with a kind of horrified fascination.

“That’s Tony the Terrible.” Loki stared at the page again, trying to retrieve his train of thought. Maybe he could get one of those fake rubber bones. Thor could bury it in the store-room and dig it up whenever he came by. 

“The Terrible what?” Thor was probably poking Tony the troll doll, who was Bruce’s idea. Not to be outdone when it came to household gods, he’d brought in the toy to ‘watch over Hector the Hanging God’. Since arriving, Tony the Terrible had grown a stupid goatee, and stood on a shelf where he could see out of the one-sided mirror.

“Oh, just generally terrible, really,” Loki said, picking up a pen and starting at it. Maybe he could throw the bone and yell ‘fetch!’ Much more practical than rope, after all... And Thor would get exercise as well, which was important when you worked in an office, right?

“Father would disapprove if he found out.” Thor shuffled out of the store-room and examined a print that Loki had on the wall.

“Father had better not find out then.” Loki gave up on the ledger. He scribbled a note to himself, since perhaps that way he might have a faint hope of remembering where he was up to.

“I gave you this picture,” Thor said, now bumping around by the door that lead to Bruce’s flat. It was by Heironomous Bosch, and Bruce had stuck a note under it that said ‘Find something no one else has and win a prize!!’ Under it was a list. It was quite long.

“Yes. Tony hated it so I put it up here.” Loki didn’t look up, but picked up his coat and retrieved a gift-bag from under the desk. It was pretty big, and contained a cat that danced if you plugged into an MP3 player. He’d found it on a website that promised you a present for the man who has everything. He’d put it there a week earlier, so that he wouldn’t forget it, and Tony wouldn’t eat it.

“Is that mine?” Thor asked, eagerly reaching out. 

“Why would it be for you?” Loki smacked his hand away. “You have to wait till we get to the house.” 

Loki locked up whilst Thor flagged down a taxi. He did this with a sort of supernatural ease. Loki assumed it was because most taxi drivers realised at a sort of bone-deep level that denying any Viking was a really good way to wake up with your house on fire, all your belongings gone and a cross, bearded person standing outside. Or he just exuded such good will that it slowed down the cabs like glue in a cartoon. Loki wrinkled his nose at that image as he tucked away his keys. How grotesque. He opened the door for Thor, since it was his birthday, and slid in after him.

As they pulled away, he poked at the courier box and said, “What’s in there?”

Thor snatched it away. “Mamma’s cinnamon rolls. And a scarf.” 

Loki reached out more eagerly, and Thor slapped his hand away. “You have to wait till we get to the house.” 

Loki sighed and surrendered the box to his brother. Frigga’s recipe for cinnamon rolls was a closely-guarded family secret, and she always sent a box for their birthdays, along with some sort of hand-knitted item. Last year Loki had got fingerless gloves. A few years before that he’d eaten all the rolls before Thor had come to see him and then spent the rest of the day in bed, convinced his time had come, and he was going to die of a twisted gut, appendicitis and something terrible going on in his stomach. Thor hadn’t said anything, and neither had his mother, but Loki had never done it again. 

“Have you called home recently?” Thor asked, almost tentatively. Loki rolled his eyes, and folded his arms. The thought of calling home made his chest ache. It was the most uncomfortable combination of lie and truth for him, calling Frigga 'Mamma'. Sometimes Loki wondered if he should have talked to his mother more about his ancestry... Would it actually help? He looked over at Thor, who was looking at him expectantly.

“No, but tell Mother I’ll call her on Sunday.”

Thor brightened up immediately, and Loki felt better despite himself, and rolled his eyes. It was impossible not to be pleased when Thor was pleased, really. He had always been the golden boy, even maintaining a clean-cut look with long hair in a pony-tail and a beard. It was no surprise that—

“We’re near, brother. You wanted to stop a few streets over, did you not?” Thor broke into his thoughts to lean over and talk to the driver, who barely interrupted his monologue about England’s foreign policy.

Indeed he had. Darcy was standing on a street corner, face up-turned in the crisp autumn air. Loki greeted her, trying to pretend he wasn’t relieved. If he was Darcy Lewis, he would have realised his mistake at least several hours before and even now be making an emergency exit from the continent. He tried to work out whether he should hug her or not, and ended up doing a sort of weird arm flap thing that hopefully conveyed pleasure at their meeting rather than his desire to carry her off like an owl. And that was a weird thought to have as well. Was he staring? How did she do this? People were easy and he was very good at people, but here he was pretending to be an owl.

“Who’s your friend?” Thor asked, switching back to English now that someone else was there, smiling down at Darcy, his easy-going presence dissipating any awkwardness there was almost certainly emanating from Loki, who had never been so pleased that Thor got along with everyone. Darcy gave Thor a look Loki recognised as the ‘my knight in shining armour’ look that all women seemed to give Thor at some point, even if he never rescued them from any dragons. Loki, who inevitably had ended up playing the evil wizard or whatever when they were kids, had never been so irritated that Thor got along with everyone. If Thor ever had a super-power, it was his power to irritate Loki to the point of murder whilst doing nothing except being preternaturally likable. Loki cleared his throat, because he couldn’t actually breathe fire.

“This is Darcy. Darcy, this is my brother, Thor.”

“Hey, big guy. Jeez, standing between you two I wish I’d worn heels.” Darcy shook hands with Thor and let him bend to kiss her on the cheek. Loki resisted the urge to hit Thor with a rolled-up newspaper. Thor always charmed people, and then they would be Thor’s friend instead of Loki’s. It always happened like this. He held out an arm for Darcy without pretending it was a wing, and she took it, giving him a faintly puzzled look. Did she not understand how difficult it was when Thor insisted on stealing all his friends?

“So Darcy, you’re American? I have just returned from there.” Thor fell into step beside them, completely unaware or uncaring of how close he came to death from Loki fire-breath.

“You have?” Darcy smiled up at his brother. Loki dug his hands into his pockets so hard it was a wonder he didn’t just burst right through them. Brilliant. This was just typical. One look at the big lug and she was smitten. Loki knew he was no troll, but he also felt he’d never really been able to live up to Thor’s more obvious charms. Like looking like the better class of rugby player; one who knew how to read and things and would always stand you a drink.

“Yes, my fiancée lives in New Mexico. I had business in New York but she came up to visit. She is an amazing woman…” Thor got that misty-eyed look he always got talking about Jane and Loki, who had an allergy to the pink love-hearts his brother emitted at the thought of his beloved, mimed being sick in a hedge to relieve his feelings. He caught Darcy looking at him and tried to pretend he was coughing. Maybe he’d got away with it.

“That sounds nice.” Darcy’s voice betrayed nothing. Perhaps he had got away with it. Loki looked over at her and immediately knew he hadn’t got away with it, with an odd little flutter that perhaps indicated he wasn’t all that annoyed. 

“It was!” Thor said, enthused. “We went to this odd little restaurant, it had all this memorabilia on the walls and things, and the food was excellent. I went there last time I was in New York, and this time I took Jane. You should go when you are next in New York.”

“Oh?”

“It was called Chilli’s—What?” Thor looked confused as Darcy gave a little splutter of laughter.

“Oh, Thor, honey, no.” Darcy looked like she was about to crack up. Thor looked confused. Loki wondered if he might not be in love. “That’s a chain restaurant. Didn’t Jane tell you?”

“Oh…” Thor looked crestfallen. 

Loki grimaced at his face despite himself (and if there was a phrase that summed up his relationship with Thor, it was ‘despite himself’) and said, “Probably she thought you already knew, brother.”

Thor sighed nonetheless, and Darcy patted his arm soothingly.

“Cheer up big guy. She was probably so pleased to see you she would have eaten in a dumpster and not noticed.”

Thor looked cheered up. “You are most kind to say so.”

Darcy smiled up at Thor, but her hand found Loki’s. All of the hair from his fingers to the top of his head stood on end like he’d had a very specific and not entirely unpleasant electric shock. Maybe this wasn’t going to be such a bad evening.

“How far are we going anyway?” Darcy asked. At that moment, with her fingers laced with his, he would have quite happily walked to the end of the world. Even with Thor cheerily drumming a stick along the iron railings next to him.

“Just round the corner,” he said, reluctantly.

“Really?” Darcy asked as they turned.

Loki stopped, and opened a gate with a smirk. “Yes. ”

Thor all but ran up the path and began knocking enthusiastically at the door while Loki and Darcy caught him up. The door opened quickly, with Steve giving Thor a patient but very tired look. Thor gave Steve that sort of one-armed punch-hug only big enthusiastically sporty men give each other, and then Thor clattered through so he didn’t block the way. Loki looked Steve up and down and winced.

“I can’t believe you’re wearing that apron.”

“You bought it.” Steve slapped him on the back, and Loki stumbled and almost dropped the gift bag.

“You need to fix this rug," he complained, righting himself, pretending he didn’t notice the scuff marks on the door-frame or the parallel rubber lines running faintly but permanently down the laminate flooring. Sometimes six months could seem simultaneously so long and so short, it made him feel a bit swimmy in the chest.

“And you must be…” Steve trailed off and blinked as he finally recognised Loki’s companion.

“Darcy.” Darcy shook Steve’s hand. “Loki, do you know any men who aren’t as wide at the shoulders as I am tall? Love the apron, by the way.” Steve blushed, and tried to hide the ‘ALL AMERICAN BEEF’ slogan running at waist height across the apron.

“Why don’t you come through?” he mumbled, holding out one hand, which was wearing a very ancient and scorched floral oven-glove. Loki took Darcy’s coat and hung it up for her (noticing and then forcing himself not to notice how there were only Steve’s coats kept up there now, and faint pencil marks where a second set of hangers might go a bit lower) and Steve led the way down the hall. In the dining/kitchen area, Natasha was laying the table, and Thor was making himself useful opening a bottle of wine. 

Steve rubbed the back of his neck, all gee-whiz charm. Why was everyone more charming than Loki tonight? Was it because he was an owl? “Er, are you that Darcy?”

“Guilty.” Darcy smiled, a little ruefully. 

“Gosh.” Steve said. Loki could almost hear him trying to work out if he could ask for an autograph.

“Not now,” he advised, peering over Steve’s shoulder.

“Hey Loki.” Natasha stopped folding napkins and came over to him, smiling that little smile she kept just for him. Loki had always wondered when folding little fans out of cloth had been part of basic training in the Army. Maybe it was something you learned when you were a consulting security guard. 

“Hallo, Tasha-mín.” Loki bent to hug her briefly. “You took the beads off your wheels.” Loki pointed out, disappointed. Natasha looked down at the wheels of her chair and back up.

“So I did.”

“I spent a whole evening on that,” he complained.

“I know, but they didn’t match any of my work clothes. Who’s your friend?” 

“Darcy.” Darcy shook hands with her. Natasha’s face betrayed nothing as she murmured a polite greeting back, but she pinched Loki’s arm very hard as she wheeled past to the sideboard and pulled out some glasses. Loki rubbed his arm. Natasha could make her feelings very clear sometimes. Apparently, knowing Darcy Lewis was fine, but actually bringing her to the house unannounced was a bruise-worthy offence. Loki thought this was a little unfair; at least Natasha could be around her without making a fool of himself. If anything, the stress was all on Loki.

Natasha still had the mild hostess face on. “Of course you are. Would you like a drink?”

“Uh, sure.” Darcy smiled, tightly.

“We’ve got water, wine...”

“Wine would be great, thanks.” 

Loki wondered if not all the stress was on him after all. After all, she had to pretend to like spending her evening in a steamy kitchen drinking boxed wine out of glasses that were definitely only glass (Loki knew because he’d bought them as a house-warming present) instead of champagne out of crystal flutes. Steve was trying very hard not to look flustered as he battled with something mysterious on the stove, although that could have been more to do with the burning smell than Darcy Lewis sipping wine in his kitchen. Steve grimaced at the roasting tray in his hands, and offered a slightly apologetic smile to Loki. Loki inspected the tray. 

“I don’t think that’s really burnt.”

“It is...” Steve said miserably. “Tonight of all nights...”

“It’s not burnt, it’s caramelised to intensify the flavour,” Loki insisted. Out of all of Thor’s friends, Natasha had chosen the least hopelessly oafish, and Loki liked to encourage him to do things that weren’t running after oddly shaped balls. And he’d been very good after Natasha had been pensioned out of active service six months previously (and even now Loki could remember how small she looked lying in a white hospital bed). Natasha was the type who never asked for help, but Steve had got round it by just giving it. Loki had liked him better for that.

“Loki.” Natasha pushed a glass into his hand and poked him hard in the side. “Help Steve with the starter, will you?”

Loki, clutching his side, opened the fridge and pulled out a bowl of homemade hummus. Darcy leant over the counter whilst he started to chop vegetables into strips. Thor came too, but wandered off after Loki smacked him with a carrot for stealing a slice of capsicum.

“So how come you don’t know any British people?” she asked, stealing a slice of her own. Loki considered hitting her with a carrot, but it suddenly seemed like that would be a vaguely obscene gesture, really.

“Just lucky, I suppose.” Loki didn’t look up from where he was waving the sharp blade round his fingers. “Steve met Thor at school; some scholarship programme, I think. And then he met Natasha at university, through me.”

“Oh. That explains everything.” Darcy said in a voice that suggested it probably didn’t. She looked round, and lowered her voice. “Thor doesn’t know who I am, does he?”

“Probably not. I think he sleeps through the in-flight movie.” Loki looked up then, and they both laughed. 

 

~*~

Dinner was what Darcy immediately dubbed Western fusion. Steve had done the beef American-style, in a crock pot with vegetables like his Mum did. However, the potatoes were straight from Nigella, parboiled, rolled in oil and cornflour and roasted, with Yorkshire puddings and carrots roasted in honey. There were green vegetables too, broccoli and greens. Thor took a bit of everything with every sign of cheery anticipation, but Loki, as was his wont, was a different matter.

“You forgot your vegetables,” Natasha pointed out, passing the bowl down.

“No I didn’t.” Loki pointed at the potatoes.

“No, green vegetables.”

“Look, I’m a grown man, and it’s up to me whether I die of scurvy or not. Anyway, my ancestors never had broccoli and they invented longships and sagas and things, didn’t they?” Loki replied, but it was pretty evident the argument was already over.

“When you act like a grown man, you’ll be treated like a grown man. Until then, you’ll eat your vegetables and like it.” Natasha ladled a healthy dose onto his plate. “And don’t pull that face, it’ll stick like that and then girls won’t like you.”

As Loki drowned his potatoes with gravy and not, as Natasha pointed out, with sulking, he heard Darcy whisper to Steve, “Does this always happen?”

“Everytime. Just pretend it’s grace.” Steve said, blushing when she smiled at her, and passing some potatoes in his confusion, even though she already had some. 

 

~*~

After the meal, it was Loki’s turn to empty the table. He turned automatically to Thor.

“No, you can’t con him into helping. It’s his birthday.” Natasha poured Thor more wine as a hint.

Loki got up and grasped her shoulders, tugging her backwards from the table and into the kitchen. “Fine, you can do it. You’re actually perfect for it, because you’re like a mobile tea-tray like that.” The witticism felt a little metallic in his mouth. Referring to Natasha’s... Situation always did. 

She punched him in the knee-cap and started to collect the plates. Loki, limping a little, got the cake from the shelf Steve had hidden it from whilst Natasha found little plates. Loki would never admit it out loud but Steve made the best cakes. This particular creation was a dark chocolate Victoria sponge with strawberry butter icing. Loki found the box of candles and stuck all fifty of them in, because really, it was the only thing he could do in such a situation. Stupidly, Steve hadn’t made the cake big enough, but Loki improvised until the cake bristled from every angle. Then he found a lighter.

“Someone get the lights!” he called into the room, carefully lighting the last candle. He lifted the cake, very carefully, and took it through. The room was darkened, with Steve standing by the light with his camera, which cost more than anyone should willingly spend on a small black box. Darcy’s eyes almost bugged out.

“Holy crap. Did you just set the whole thing on fire?”

“It’s traditional,” Loki said, with a certain amount of satisfaction.

“My fault, I bought a packet of fifty candles,” Steve piped up, rolling his eyes. “You go near the curtains with that thing...” 

“Not all of us replaced brains with muscles.” Loki snapped, happily putting the cake on the table. Natasha smiled, and Thor looked delighted as they sang happy birthday and Steve took a photo of Thor blowing out the candles. Due to the number of candles meant there was more than one opportunity for photos, something Thor seemed to regard this as a challenge rather than an actual problem.

“Fifty candles. That's almost two for every year,” Loki said happily, as Thor triumphantly blew out the last one and sat back with red cheeks and heaving chest. Darcy squeezed Loki’s leg, and they shared a smile that made Loki’s heart skip a couple of beats. Thor cut the cake, eyes tight shut as he made a wish, and then Steve took over. Thor’s genius did not extend to cutting cake, as previous crumbled experience had shown. Steve, on the other hand, exhibited a fairness bordering on single-minded.

“Oh my god, I’m going to be on a treadmill for a hundred years after this,” Darcy sighed, starting her second slice of cake with a look that made Loki’s toes curl. The rest of him significantly didn’t curl, and was glad for the big billowy tablecloth that covered everything someone might want covered when Darcy had that look on her face.

“I think you look fine as you are,” Steve said, gallantly.

“Charmer. You can come and tell my personal trainer that tomorrow.” Darcy sucked her fork. “And you can give me the recipe for this cake. Dear god...”

Steve blushed.

 

~*~

After cake, Thor couldn’t contain himself any more and demanded his presents, in a way that was totally charming, despite the way Loki was irresistibly reminded of Thor age seven. 

“Loki, please would you pass Thor his presents?” Steve asked.

Loki was deep in conversation with Natasha and didn’t hear. This had nothing to do with the fact the presents were lined up on the sideboard behind him.

“They’re on the sideboard behind you.” Steve prompted.

“I know that, I put them there myself.” Loki said innocently, not looking round.

Darcy nudged him.

“Don’t be mean.”

“I’m not being mean, he needs to learn people don’t just jump when he tells them to,” Loki grumbled. He put the presents on the table, and sloped off to make coffee. 

In the kitchen, he started the coffee machine and found the box of cinnamon rolls. Steve always hid them in the same place, so it wasn’t hard. He lay them on a baking tray and stuck them in the oven to warm through, and then leant on the door-frame between the kitchen and the dining-room to watch Thor, who was wearing the ear-warmers that Steve had got him (Loki didn’t know why either), and Darcy was leaning forward to listen to him, already smiling at his joke. The candlelight made her skin glow, bringing out rich auburn highlights in her hair... Natasha broke his gaze as she leaned out across the table, raising her eyebrows at him. He glared, because actually he was just really grumpy about Thor always getting what he wanted as soon as he wanted instead of just staring like a twit, and she gave a small smile that meant she had won. Damn. 

“So okay, I’ll bite. You and Loki, you’re Icelandic, right?” Darcy asked Thor. “So... Why don’t you sound Icelandic? I mean, I figure you haven’t just fallen off the longship, but I had an Icelandic make-up artist, and you don’t sound like her at all.”

“It’s because—” Thor began.

“It’s because our father decided we needed the best education. And only in England can education and seventeen years of psychological torture meet.” Loki interrupted from the doorway. “Bedford and Eton. One of the very first things we learned was to lose the accents.”

“It was not that bad,” Thor protested. 

“Maybe for you,” Loki grumbled, heading back into the kitchen with his arms folded. “Rugby players can have silly accents.” Anti-social book-worms could too, of course. Just their chances of getting tied to the bed for an impromptu game of Spanish Inquisition where Loki was always the witch were much, much higher.

“You seem pretty happy in the picture that Mamma gave me...” Thor fumbled for his phone.

“What picture?” Loki demanded, dashing back into the room holding one cup and a milk bottle. “No, Thor, you can’t...”

“Show me!” Darcy demanded. Thor was grinning as he scrolled through the pictures on his phone. The timer dinged on the oven, and Loki wondered if anyone saw him doing the indecision dance before rushing for the rolls. He pulled out the rolls and heard a peal of gloriously feminine laughter.

“It’s an old photo!” he yelled, dumping the rolls onto a plate at double speed, even though the disaster was complete. 

“It’s amazing. You have to send it to me.” Darcy was still giggling. “Look at the _hair_...”

“I’m going to kill you.” Loki poked his head round the corner specially to glare at his brother. Stupid rolls were in league with Thor or something in a long-term campaign to make sure that no one ever thought Loki was the least bit normal. Probably Darcy had already dismissed him as a dangerously unstable book lunatic, and now she knew he had mad hair it was all over.

“You can’t, it’s my birthday,” Thor replied, cheerily.

Loki looked back down at the plate of rolls, which were steaming smugly. “I’m onto you.”

Darcy came out to help him with the mugs. “Why isn’t your hair ginger any more?”

“I don’t know. Why don’t you ask it?” Loki poured milk into a jug and scowled at the rolls again.

Darcy balanced mugs carefully as they went back into the dining room. “Okay, Loki’s hopefully less grumpy than the rest of him hair, why are you not ginger?”

“That would be puberty.” Natasha poked Loki in the side and took the cinnamon rolls off him. Good, they were probably already plotting the next stage in their evil plan, using Thor as a catspaw. Or something. “And sorry about Loki; he’s an ass. If Eton couldn’t beat it out of him, we certainly can’t.”

“I hate you,” Loki said, lovingly.

“No you don’t.” Natasha put the plate in front of Thor, who practically bounced like someone had told him to ‘stay’.

“So why isn’t it all you know... Big?” Darcy picked up mugs and the coffee pot.

“Straighteners,” Natasha said, over her shoulder. "He can't pull off tall, dark and broody with all those curls."

“Really?” Darcy almost dropped the mugs.

“No. It’s not true,” Loki called from in the fridge where he was putting the milk away. “Anyway, Tony broke them.”

“Ah, that explains the extra fluffy...” Natasha made a little flicky motion at the back of her head. Darcy cackled.

“I hate you more,” Loki sighed. Maybe the rolls were using Natasha as a catspaw instead. He wouldn’t put it past them.

“I’ve been thinking about these rolls since Minsk,” Thor said, hooking one onto his plate. “It was the longest flight I’ve ever taken.”

“I thought Australia to Kuala Lumpar was your longest flight. Or was it Switzerland to Abu Dhabi?” Loki added sugar to his coffee.

“None of those flights had rolls at the end,” Thor pointed out, amicably. 

“And you went first class.” Loki added sugar to his coffee, accusingly.

“I had this child next to me. He threw up for most of the flight.” Thor’s usually cheery face fell a little. “I didn’t know children had so much capacity.”

“You think you had it bad. I made _The Hungry Caterpillar_ magically appear from my handkerchief today, and the little girl just looked at me as though I’d pulled something else out entirely.” 

Natasha took the sugar away from him in a definite way. “This is not going to be like Thor’s twenty-third birthday again.” There was general laughter at this, and Loki tried to fry them into silence with his stare.

“What happened on Thor’s twenty-third birthday?” Darcy took her coffee black. Loki filed this away. It was good, but then everything Darcy did was good. He had yet to find something that was bad.

“Loki drank six cans of Red Bull. I had to tempt him out of a tree with a cookie.” An unfortuantely unfried Steve grinned. It was so unfair. He really shouldn’t have let the guy marry Natasha, even if it did mean he could make endless Cold War jokes.

“He didn’t,” Loki muttered. It had been a Jaffa cake. He remembered that much, anyway.

“No no, I remember Loki’s nineteenth birthday,” Thor waved half a roll expansively.

“Thor! You swore you’d never tell.” Loki wondered if he should just go lock himself in the toilet. Maybe till time ended.

“Oh, you told me about this,” Steve started to giggle. “You lost that bet with Tasha, right? The time with those fairy wings and pink tights?”

“Ooh, are there pictures of those too?” Darcy asked, eagerly. She squeezed his thigh again, and Loki realised that being cross whilst melting into goo inside was probably making him do a funny expression. 

“No,” he said at exactly the same time Natasha said, “Yes, but I promised I wouldn’t show them till he got married.”

Loki took a celebratory bite of cinnamon roll at the good news but Darcy deflated a little. No surprise there. She was probably going to enjoy the Scandinavian freak-show and then never come to London again after tonight. Not that he blamed her. He took a conciliatory bite of cinnamon roll.

“So you guys have known each other a long time right?” Darcy sniffed at her coffee, closing her eyes for a moment before taking a sip. Loki bit his bottom lip.

“Yeah. I mean, I didn’t meet Thor till college—I joined up on the soccer team and he was on it too. But Natasha and Loki have known each other for years,” Steve explained.

“Loki can be very persistent.” Natasha poked him again. “And my Dad knows his Dad.”

“Fishing buddies?” Darcy asked. Her hand was still on Loki’s thigh, which was making it almost impossible to concentrate.

“Are you kidding? In Iceland that means spearing fish from a hole in the ice.” Loki shrugged. “They hunt moose.”

“Really?” Darcy almost dropped her roll.

“Yeah, they use a bow and arrow—” Natasha moved, sharply. “Ow!” Loki stopped feeling all gooey inside, and clutched his ankle.

“Sorry, Loki. I accidentally ran into your foot.” Natasha smiled at Darcy. “They fish. With poles. Loki and I used to just sort of run wild.”

“There’s a mental image.” Darcy grinned at Loki and squeezed his knee again. The pain went away almost like magic.

Thor poured more coffee, misty with embarrassingly good recollection. Loki wondered if he could stun him with the rest of the cake. “One time they got stuck out on the island on the lake. Pabbi had to take the boat out and rescue them. Boy, was he cross.” 

Loki and Natasha winced sympathetically. Odin was intimidating enough, and by the time he had reached the little island he had been in a towering rage that Loki would have preferred to witness from much further away — perhaps from the moon?

“That was not my fault. Tasha-mín here sunk the boat.” Loki protested.

“Excuse me. I believe you were the one steering.” Natasha punched his arm.

Loki rubbed at the afflicted place, looking wounded. “You were the one who was supposed to tell me when there was land.”

It had only happened because Loki had become convinced that he should be the next Erik the Red. He would discover a brand-new land, but he wouldn’t choke at the last minute because of a horse. So they commandeered the little dinghy off the side of his father’s yacht and went for a trial voyage. It had ended with them both stranded on a tiny island with nothing to eat except a packet of liquorice allsorts, since each thought the other was going to bring provisions.

Natasha covered a laugh. “I heard Frigga telling Mama that she’d never seen Odin so pale, especially with all the blood.”

“Blood?” Darcy’s eyes widened.

“Our first and only kiss. It was terrible. He almost broke my nose.” Natasha looked like someone admitting to an embarrassing secret. 

Loki huffed. “You pulled me into it too hard.” 

Darcy laughed. “That explains an awful lot actually.”

“Explains why she had to find a new boyfriend,” Loki muttered. Up until that point, everyone, including Loki, had thought Natasha and Loki were sure to be married when they were older; a useful business tie for their families and a good match for a marriage of alliance. Natasha had other plans though, and in the end, she had been right to stick by them. Even if it meant she was where she was now, ie sitting in a chair (Loki winced mentally), she had Steve, and frankly, while Loki would rather be hung, drawn and quartered than admit it, they were perfect for eachother. 

“You still with us, Loki?” Darcy asked, touching his shoulder.

“Oh, yes.” Loki eyed the plate at the centre of the table. There was one cinnamon roll left. Loki reached for it at the same time as Thor, and glared at his brother.

“No, I reached for it first. I get it.”

“No, I get it. It’s my birthday,” Thor replied. Loki snagged the plate. He was prepared to run.

“I deserve it more! I didn’t get any presents—” 

Loki suddenly found the plate yanked away from him by Steve, who held it out of both their reaches.

“No, I deserve it.” Thor watched the plate with the closest thing he seemed to get to an annoyed look. “Monday I was in America, Tuesday I was in Minsk, and now I’m in London, and that’s a confusing thing for any mortal man to get his head round. And I had to fire two people because they had been selling secrets. And I thought Chilli’s was a good place to take my fiancée on a date.”

“You flew first class.” Loki glowered at Steve. “I get the roll. I’m stuck in a horrid shop all day with puling idiots who have no idea how books even work. I haven’t even had a holiday in over two years. I’ve never been out with a girl for more than two weeks, let alone long enough to fool one into marrying me, and even if I did I wouldn't be able to take her home to meet Mum and Dad because—”

He stopped, abruptly, clicking his teeth on _because they’re not my real Mum and Dad._ He felt rather like he’d bitten down on a marble. Thor was looking like he rather wanted to hug him, but Loki figured he could duck in time. Natasha gently pounded her fist on his thigh a couple of times, and Darcy had her eyebrows raised again. Great, now she would certainly make her excuses and leave, swearing off Icelandic men forever as crazy, flat-pack-furniture Vikings...

“I found out I can’t have children,” Natasha said quietly. Everyone turned and looked at her, which meant they weren’t looking at Loki like he was the man behind the curtain, on which basis he almost gave Natasha his cinnamon roll right there and then. Loki realised that what had made it worse was it was like they’d always known the man behind the curtain was there. Steve took her hand, and for a moment looked so sad Loki wondered if he should split it between the two of them. Natasha allowed a small smile. “Hell of a week, really. The tests meant I had to spend two days staring hopefully at the most delicious fondue in the world at a conference and everything. And since I didn’t get fondue, I definitely get a cinnamon roll.”

Loki looked at the table. He was thinking about Natasha in her hospital bed, looking up at faceless doctors with grim expressions as they explained that she’d never walk again. It seemed unfair that they had lied about what else she should be able to do. Someone was touching his thigh. When he looked up, Darcy gave him a small smile, and took his hand.

“Hey, I get a turn. Fair’s fair,” Steve was still holding Natasha’s hand. The other was holding the plate. “I definitely deserve it more than you. My mother never sends me baking. I have to live vicariously through the voracious Vikings over there. And Loki just tried to set my house on fire with a cake—”

“I did not,” Loki muttered, sulkily.

“And today I finally managed to stick it to my late and not at all lamented father and sign up for art classes.” Steve smiled shyly.

Natasha maneuvered closer to her husband to kiss him on the cheek, smiling proudly. Thor was booming congratulations and Loki smiled, thinking that leaving those art school brochures in the shop might come in handy. It was always nice to see a scheme come together.

“I think it is a fine thing for Steve to have the roll.” Thor beamed, and everyone beamed back. It was impossible not to be happy when Thor was happy.

“Can I have a go?” Darcy piped up. 

Loki gave her a funny look. Everyone gave her a funny look. 

“...You want a go?” Loki said, finally. 

“Well, yeah. Why not? Worth a shot.” Darcy had taken her hand from his and had them both on the table, clasped round her coffee mug.

Steve sighed, and put the cinnamon roll back down. “So close...”

“Well, I started out in that _Magnificent Mildred_ TV series right, when I was like, seven, right? And by the time I quit when I was eleven, I was having so much fun that I liked being in _Jodie Raffles: Girl Detective_ and all those stupid after-school shows. And then when I got to sixteen, I suddenly realised what I’d done. I couldn’t, hell, still can’t go out and get falling-down drunk like everyone else I know, because I can’t even go to a seven-eleven without some complete scumbag and his long-range camera taking a photo of me. And believe me, if you’re a child star and you’re caught on one bad day—” she made an exploding noise, “forget about your career. You’re a wild child, you’ve gone off the rails, you’re doped up and dangerous. Only one person came back from that shit, and he had to literally play himself as a superhero to get it to work.” Now it was Loki’s turn to stare. “I mean, I’ve been in Oscar-winning movies. Hell, I’ve got two Golden Globes, but no one will ever let me play with Shakespeare or Beckett because everyone sees that cutie-goddamn-patootie Jodie Raffles. And one day, I’ll play myself as a spoiled and faded child-star, and everyone will applaud me for having such a good sense of humour about myself, and I’ll maybe get a recurring spot on some stupid sitcom, which’ll pay alimony to the three husbands I desperately want to keep quiet so I don’t wind up the next goddamn Charlie Sheen.”

She was panting a little. Loki realised with the sick little joy that comes with such things that he was quite possibly completely in love.

Thor was the first to break the silence.

“Wait. Are you famous?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> First off, thank you to everyone who's commented and kudosed thus far, it is always appreciated and wanted and oh man I just want to come into your houses and make you tea.
> 
> It has come to my attention that the painting I mentioned in Chapter One has only just been mentioned here in Chapter Three and I am a huge numpty! It is [The Garden of Earthly Delights](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Garden_of_Earthly_Delights) by Heironymus Bosch and is basically a Where's Wally of Weird Shit. Go see if you can find the dude having sex with an owl.
> 
> Oh. And Loki's school picture that Thor mocks him so so cruelly over is [this one](http://s1277.photobucket.com/user/zeta-tauri/media/lokisbabypicture_zpsf857c2d5.png.html). It was expertly manipulated by [ZetaTauri](http://archiveofourown.org/users/ZetaTauri/pseuds/ZetaTauri) Who has written some rather good AU stuff and porn and things.
> 
> See you next time!


	4. Chapter Four

Loki and Darcy made their exit earlier than the others, mainly because Loki wanted to prove that he was capable of acting like a normal person. They left Thor drinking wine with Steve and giggling over someone called Dum Dum, inexplicably enough, while Natasha saw them to the door. She thumped Loki on the thigh and when he leaned down to hug her, she whispered, “Don’t fuck it up,” in Icelandic.

“Shut up,” Loki replied in the same language. 

The door shut behind them, cutting off Thor’s booming laughter. 

“I’m so sorry; all my friends are so terrible. I must get some better ones.” Loki opened the gate for her. 

“No, I like your friends. And your brother.” Darcy grinned up at him and took his hand as they started to walk.

“If I told you he’d been dropped on his head as a child, would you believe me?” Loki wondered if Darcy had some sort of communicable sherbet. His arm felt fizzy. Nice, but fizzy. Maybe he was dying. Then he looked down at Darcy smiling up at him and thought maybe it was worth it.

“No. He’s great. They’re great. It’s been so long since I’ve hung out with normal people though. I probably came off as a total lunatic.” Darcy laughed, but not like it was funny.

“No, you could never, I mean... They loved you.” Loki bit down on the end of the sentence. _I love you._

They walked in silence for a bit. “Don’t you have a car with some sort of strategically-shaved gorilla in a hat coming for you?”

“I said I’d call. I wanted to talk to you without your friends.”

“Oh.” Did that mean she didn’t like them really? Loki wasn’t sure about that.

“Don’t look so worried. I just figured it would be rude to just eat and dash, is all.” Darcy turned her face up. “Look, there’s a star.”

“In London? That’s probably a helicopter.” Loki gave a cursory glance upwards.

“You romantic.” Darcy squeezed his hand. They walked in quiet for a bit, and Loki thought that he could walk forever like this. It might be a bit inconvenient, for eating and so on, but they could work out a system for that. He could have control of the hands in the middle on alternate days. Yes. Perfect. 

Darcy broke the silence first. “So... Have you been running the bookshop long?”

“About three years now.” Loki kicked at a dead leaf.

“You must like to read, then?”

Loki rolled his eyes. It was such a stupid question, and everyone asked it. “No, I hate it. The bookshop is just my own personal method of torture.” 

Darcy gave him a long look. “That would explain a lot.”

“What do you mean by that?” Loki demanded. Darcy laughed, but it didn’t feel like she was laughing at him, even though she technically was, so Loki didn’t mind.

“I like the houses in England.” Darcy ignored him. “They’re just more you know, ageless, than the ones in America.”

“That’s because America isn’t old enough to be ageless yet.” Loki still wasn’t sure about the bookshop comment.

“Try telling that to Joan Rivers.” Darcy said. “Hey, is this a garden? I’ve seen a ton of them around here.” She stopped at one of the walled gardens and peered through the gate. She let go of Loki’s hand to do it, and he felt a little betrayed. What about the alternate days? He’d even got the bathroom arrangements worked out...

“Do you think we could go in?” She tugged on the gate. Loki found the lock.

“The padlock suggests no.” 

“Oh...” Darcy stared through the gates again. “How come when you know you can’t have something, you want it all the more?”

_Tell me about it,_ Loki thought, watching the streetlamp dye Darcy’s hair orange. It shouldn’t have been beautiful, but it was. He knelt down and laced his hands together.

“Milady’s leg up.”

“But the padlock...”

“Only suggested no.” He smiled up at her mischievously.

Darcy grinned, wicked in the sodium light. She planted one foot in Loki’s hands and he boosted her over the gate.

“Jeez. Stronger than you look.” Darcy landed in a heap on the other side. “Ow... Who’d have thought under that skinny nerd body there’s a Superman lurking.”

“More like a supervillain. They get all the best outfits.” Loki followed her over the iron gate and landed smugly on his feet.

“And the best songs.” Darcy pulled herself upright. “You did a really good step there, by the way.”

“Natasha’s very short, and it’s—it was easier just to boost her sometimes.” Somewhere nearby, a tiny dog started to yap furiously.

“Natasha wasn’t always in the chair?” Darcy looked around. The garden was a little paradise really, in terms of green areas in suburban London. There were flower-beds that actually had flowers in, and the grass was green, rather than sort of yellow and mangy. The dog continued to yap. Loki thought it might actually yap itself inside out.

“No, about six months, I think.” Loki scrubbed his hand across his mouth. The memory of seeing her in a hospital bed still made him wobbly, like someone had severely knocked the world off its axis. “I didn’t know about the baby thing though.”

“Do you think they’ll adopt?” Darcy was crunching down the gravel path with evident glee. Some small part of Loki stood up and screamed.

“I don’t know.” Loki stepped on the small part of him. It was none of his business if they chose to adopt. They could do whatever they wanted and Loki would be happy for them. “Listen, we shouldn’t be in here, really. It’s probably illegal, and you know...” he said it loudly. Anything to stop thinking about how happy he was about Natasha and Steve adopting, no really...

“Aw, come on, is this the same kid who went on an adventure and came home covered in blood?”

“It was Natasha covered in blood,” Loki said absently, still locked in an internal civil war about happiness and adoption. But he didn’t go back to the gate.

“Hey, a tree.” Darcy’s footsteps quickened.

“I think it’s an apple tree.” Loki made strides towards it and away from the past. The dog stopped yapping briefly, but Loki didn’t trust it. Unless one of its neighbours had finally snapped and smothered the stupid thing.

“Do you think they’d be ripe?” Darcy squinted up into the dark branches hopefully.

“Only one way to find out.” Loki hauled himself into the branches. They were just about thick enough to support his weight, if he didn’t jiggle about a lot. The yappy dog clearly sensed this new outrage, jiggling or not, and started to bark even harder.

“Do you think its head might explode?” Darcy kicked at a root. She tried for the lowest branch, but was too short. She huffed and kicked another root.

Loki picked an apple and examined it in the orange gloom. “One can only hope.”

Darcy laughed, and Loki almost fell out of the tree in the middle of the first experimental bite of apple. 

“Are they ripe?” she asked.

“I think so. Look out below...” Loki dropped one down to her and picked a few more, and it was all going fine till the branch he was on snapped. He crashed to earth, landing sprawled on his stomach, apples rolling away from him, unheeded.

Darcy let out a bark of guilty laughter and rushed over to him. “Oh man, that looked brutal. Are you okay?”

“...” Loki flopped onto his back. This was how the salmon must feel when the grizzly bear of gravity and pride whapped it out of the water. Even the yappy dog faded from hearing.

“Is this the bit where I make a line about it hurting when you fell from heaven—” she screamed suddenly as Loki lunged for her knees, since he couldn’t reach anything higher, and she went down across Loki’s legs. He hadn’t meant for that to happen, all he’d wanted was for her to stop being delightfully awful. But he found he didn’t really mind, because Darcy was giggling and swearing revenge and above all, climbing his body in a very agreeable way. 

“Argh,” he opined.

He remembered he had arms, and reached for her.

“Hey, who’s out there?” someone yelled and a light went on in one of the houses.

“Run!” Loki sprung upright, dragging Darcy to the gate, boosting her over and tumbling after her. They ran for three streets and stopped under a streetlight, Loki bent over with his hands on his knees, trying to laugh and die of a stitch at the same time.

“You’re completely mad.” Darcy giggled.

“Am not. They might have set the dog on me. Then where would I have been?”

And then she kissed him. For a moment, Loki thought maybe everything inside him had a stitch, but then her hand went up to his shoulder and she tasted like apple, tart and fresh, and he straightened up properly, humming into her mouth as he brought her to him and remembered to breathe, although breathing suddenly seemed very unimportant. Darcy broke away first.

“Can we go back to yours? I wouldn’t usually ask but there’s generally a pap or two hanging round the hotel...”

Loki opened his mouth to say something witty, but all that came out was “Yes.”

 

~*~

They were stood at the bottom of the stairs in his house. With other girls, it was never this hard to work out what to do next. With Darcy, as ever, it was different. Despite himself, Loki hesitated.

“Would you like a drink? I can make, er... The kettle’s fixed.”

Darcy cocked her head at him. “Really?”

“Yes, I bought a new kettle on the way home.”

“I’m not really interested in a drink.” Darcy started up the stairs, smiling. Suddenly, Loki wasn’t really interested in a drink either. He let her lead him up the stairs by the hand.

He flipped on the light in his room and really wished he’d remembered to make the bed before he headed out. He tried to shuffle the cover so that Darcy wouldn’t notice, and disturbed a phone that hadn’t been there this morning. He knew because it was newer than his old phone, and also not in a drain somewhere. It was out of the box but had a charger coiled on top of it. A note attached informed Loki that his number had been ported over already. Tony seemed to change phones as often as he changed his pants, ie often enough that people didn’t comment on it any more. It was useful, in that the ones that didn’t end up horribly dissected all over the house usually went to Loki. 

Darcy looked around his back. “Oh, that’s cool. Is that your phone?”

“Looks like it.” Loki switched it on experimentally.

“Give it here.” Darcy took it and tapped at the screen, biting her lip. Loki clutched at the charger involuntarily. He pretended that he was examining it as though he didn't know whether it charged his phone or not. It might not; there was a whole drawer of random chargers in the kitchen. Loki had once thrown a bunch of them out in a fit of Tidying, and six different things in the house had stopped working over-night, including the shower. Loki had apologised and everything had started working again.

“What are you doing?” 

“Giving you my number,” she said, not looking up.

“Wow.” 

She finished and put the phone on the dresser, before turning to look round his room. She put her hands on her hips.

"You don't have many girls here do you?" 

"How can you tell?" Loki looked round himself.

"Well. For one thing, you can't seem to decide if your clothes live on the floor or on coat-hangers. For another, you have a king size bed, but it clearly has a nest built for one. There’s something absolutely terrifying on the wall that you’d better be prepared to protect me from when it comes for me in the night. And then there's the elderly stuffed rabbit looking at me disapprovingly..." 

"The cat sleeps in the bed as well. And that’s the Winter Man. He protects my room from stray roommates..." Loki pointed out, realising he sounded like a twit even as he said it. He went to to kiss her instead, but hesitated at the last moment. It felt like his whole life was balancing on this one kiss. If it was going to happen, he wanted it to be perfect. Darcy sighed, and pulled back.

"What?" Loki blinked.

"Get it over with then."

"What?" 

"It happens all the time. Wow, I'm kissing _the_ Darcy Lewis. I used to jerk off to her when I was in school." She didn't sound cross, more sad. Loki thought his heart was cracking from it. "You know, they go to bed with the Girl Detective and wake up with cranky, bed-head, probably running late me. Just once, I want a man to kiss Darcy Lewis and only expect... me." She smiled, and Loki wanted to kiss that smile away so she could never look so very sad ever again. "Sorry. I've never told anyone that before..." 

"No, it's fine, really." Loki pulled her close again. 

"Tell me something then." Darcy gave him that challenging look again. “Something to make this... Make it unique.”

"Fine." Loki looked round. "Alright. Take Kanina, there." He picked up the elderly rabbit carefully.

"No, he looks like he might bite." 

"Shut up. Or I won't tell you the story." 

"I'll be good."

"Kanina is my oldest toy. I've had him as long as I remember." Loki pulled her down onto the bed with himself and Kanina, and she snuggled up, but more to him than the toy, which was nice. "He went everywhere with me. I took him to school every year, all the way from primary school to secondary school. Over time he lost an ear, an eye, and if you open up his head, there's still the sock I stuffed him with after Gloria Wainscott's dog got him. And then I went to uni. And me and my brother, we packed suitcases, because we were going to Oxford. And I decided to leave Kanina behind, because I was a grown-up now, right? So all our old stuff was boxed up, you know, clutter and things. And I put Kanina in the box and went to bed. But that night, I had a nightmare. I don't really remember it. I was alone and it was dark and... It was..."

Darcy gave him a little squeeze.

"Anyway, next thing I knew I was in the spare room with the boxes all around me and Kanina in my hands. And my—my mother came in because I'd just pushed this big pile of boxes over at two am and and I was just sitting in the middle of it saying 'I didn't want to go in the box.' And I must have looked completely deranged, still in my pyjamas and I was crying as well, it was all terribly glamorous and not in the remotest bit like I'd escaped from some sort of asylum. And my mother, to her great credit, she said 'Fine, you don't have to go in the box.' And she gave me a hug, and she took me back to bed. She even made me a glass of hot milk and sat with me till I went to sleep."

Silence hung over them for a moment. 

"There. That's something I never told anyone." Loki tried to sound casual, even though Darcy was going to denounce him as a freak any minute now. Sure enough, she got up and he sighed and flopped back on the bed. Nice dream while he had it. But instead of leaving, she just took Kanina off him and turned it to the wall.

"Why did you do that?" Loki asked.

"Because," Darcy started to crawl up the bed towards him. "I am about to do things to you that would cause even that old thing to go pink."

She kissed him with lots of wandering hands, and then stopped again, kneeling upright and frowning.

“What?” Loki asked, dazedly. The kissing had been good. Why would she stop the kissing?

“You have to cover that painting. It’s no good.” 

Loki didn’t even hesitate, pulling off his shirt over his head and hung it over the painting. When he turned back round, Darcy’s own shirt hit him in the face.

 

After, they held hands in the dark.

“You’re very quiet,” Darcy said, into the hush. “Did you just roll over and go to sleep?” She hooked her chin on his shoulder. “Is this how you Icelandics do romance?”

“No.” Loki smiled, and opened his eyes. Usually sex left him frowsty and inclined to nap, but tonight it felt different. Cocooned in the darkness, with Darcy’s pulse under his thumb and her breath on his hair, he felt a sense of contentment that he usually associated with cinnamon rolls.

“Thinking about cinnamon rolls.”

“You think about your mother’s cinnamon rolls after sex?” Darcy giggled. “That’s kinda Freudian...”

“Don’t make me come over there.” Loki cut her off, but he was smiling. Something else he wasn’t expecting.

“What did you call me? You know, during?” Darcy asked, after another quiet moment.

“ _Elskan_?” Loki smiled to himself.

“Yeah.”

“It means ‘darling’, approximately.” Loki rolled onto his back. “Now will you let me sleep?”

“No.” Darcy tugged him towards her meaningfully. “I like it. Say it again.”

 

~*~

Loki woke up and rolled over to hit his alarm clock.

“Ow...” something said, which was odd because his alarm clock had never talked to him before.

“I... Oh.”

“Is that a good ‘oh’?” Darcy put her head up, and pushed some hair out of her face.

“I’d say so.” It meant his alarm clock hadn’t spontaneously turned into a Disney cartoon. Which meant he still wasn’t an escaped psychopath. He rolled over to celebrate this with what he had to hand, which was mainly naked Darcy, but she kissed him and wriggled away.

“I have to get up, I have like, a billion appointments.”

“ _Elskan_... Please?”

“No, I have to go.”

Loki rolled towards her, murmuring endearments in Icelandic. No one had ever found Icelandic sexy before, most of the women he’d been with had just been suspicious that he’d either been speaking in tongues, or just asking ‘Where is the bus station’. Darcy was trying to get out of bed, but he just rolled closer. He could get used to this.

 

~*~

Twenty minutes later, Darcy rolled out of bed.

“I’m going to be so late...” she lamented.

“Same...” Loki didn’t move though. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been so at one with himself.

Darcy picked up his bathrobe and slipped it on before peeping out the door, presumably looking out for Tony. Not a bad idea, with the Winter Man covered up; he was completely uncontained.

“My housemate’s out with whatever poor blind girl he’s managed to pick up.” He stretched, lazily.

“Are you sure?” Darcy picked up her clothes. The bathrobe was too big for her, and gaped at the front, which is possibly why it took Loki a second to answer.

“He left a sock on the door-knob.” As though that explained everything. Narfi hopped onto the bed stiff-tailed and sat down with his back to Loki, a clear sign that he had some spade-work to do. Loki felt this was unfair considering the circumstances.

“Hey, you can’t hold this against me. She was the one who stole your place.” He spoke in English. Icelandic for seductive purposes was one thing, but it seemed rude when he was just placating the cat.

Narfi flicked his tail, unmoved.

“Fine, tuna for breakfast?” Loki scratched the base of Narfi’s tail, persuasively. Narfi purred.

“Did you just apologise to your cat?” Darcy gave the cat a slightly mistrustful look.

“No. I negotiated. You have to apologise. You stole his spot.” Narfi turned round to look at her with the fat-faced look of a cat that knows whatever happens, tuna will occur soon.

“Seriously?”

“Yes.” Loki tried his hardest to look winsome. So did Narfi, with considerably more success.

“Fine.” Darcy crouched down to eye-level with the cat. “Narfi, I’m sorry for stealing your spot.”

Narfi licked a paw at her.

“I think you’re forgiven. Towel’s in the airing cupboard to your right.” Loki said, distracted as he watched her leave the room. It was a good view, after all. He turned back to Narfi, who was watching Darcy lazily. “Hey _kisi_ , what do you think? Good?” Narfi leant into Loki’s hand, purring fit to bust. Loki smiled at the ceiling. The ceiling didn’t smile back, which was probably a good thing, but nonetheless Loki was expecting bluebirds to sing about a wonderful day in a mildly racist way. Even the prospect of a day at the bookshop couldn’t ruin his mood, in fact, he was almost looking forward to it. (Almost, Loki was still Loki, even on a day like this.) Maybe he should leave Hector the Hanging God an offering in thanks. Maybe he could get him a clock or something. Across the hall, Darcy started the shower running. He was considering joining her when a phone rang. He frowned, dislodging Narfi, who jumped off the bed in a huff, and a few seconds fumbling in the piles of clothes found the phone in Darcy’s jacket. The display read ‘Clint’. There was an American name if he ever heard one. He could just see him, overly tanned with those scary white teeth that Americans seemed to think meant good health. Clint probably drank skinny lattes and had loud conversations on crowded trains. He probably thought Westminster was just too cute. The phone stopped ringing. Loki replaced it in the pocket and found a pair of underpants off the floor, and stepped carefully around the electronics graveyard outside his door to cross the hallway to the bathroom.

“You’d better be Loki,” Darcy said, from behind the shower-curtain.

“I’m not short or annoying enough to be anyone else.” Loki smiled despite himself and hooked the curtain aside. “Good morning, since I didn’t get to say it before.”

“Good morning yourself.” Darcy still had shampoo in her hair. Loki watched a blob slide down her neck and beyond. Lucky blob.

“Are you here for a reason or just looking?” Darcy smoothed her hair back and smiled crookedly. Loki blinked and dragged his eyes back up to her face.

“Oh. Your phone rang. I didn’t answer it, but...”

“Damn.” Darcy turned the shower off and squeezed water out of her hair quickly, before stepping past Loki and wrapping a towel around herself firmly. “All yours.”

Loki didn’t want a shower. He wanted to go and watch Darcy get dressed, and then take her out for breakfast. He caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror and winced. His hair looked like he’d stuck his finger in a plug-socket. It was so unfair. No one else had hair that treated the laws of physics like a suggestion. Or ate combs. He turned the shower on.

By the time he’d tamed his hair (he hadn’t had to resort to a whip and chair but it had been close), Darcy was dressed and pulling on her shoes.

“Stay for breakfast,” he blurted. “Not here, I mean, we only have Frosties and there’s no milk anyway but...”

“I can’t. I have to wrap up some stuff and get ready to leave.” Darcy didn’t look at him, too busy finding her sock.

“Leave?” Loki said, hollowly. He felt like the bed-covers had been snatched off the bed too soon on a cold day, and wished he’d thought to throw on a shirt as well.

“Yeah. Back to America, as it happens.” Darcy picked up her bag and kissed him. Loki closed his eyes. He could smell her perfume, and it was almost suffocating, but not in the good way it had been last night. 

“I’ll...” Darcy suddenly started to fumble in her bag. Loki couldn’t see her face. He wasn’t sure he wanted to. 

“Thank you,” she said, finally, and left.

“Well, that figures.” Loki mumbled. And it did, really. For a moment, just a moment there, he had thought... what, breakfast? Lunch, dinner? A cosy night in, a raucous night out? Marri— Narfi butted against his legs.

“Oh, sorry, your tuna...” Loki opened a tin and dumped the whole thing in Narfi’s bowl, since someone should get the morning they wanted. Then, since he was late anyway, he made a cup of tea, and sat staring at the coffee table. Clint was probably a boyfriend, or maybe a going-to-be boyfriend—Darcy didn’t strike him as the cheating type. Someone rich, famous American. Some action hero type, a much more suitable husband than a grumpy of-no-fixed-culture-or-heritage shopkeeper who once spent his entire savings on an early edition of the Poetic Edda. He gloomily entertained the mental image of Darcy in a white dress vaguely reminiscent of some royal wedding or other, gorgeous and admittedly a bit marshmallow-y, standing in front of an altar with a muscular blond man with white teeth. He was rich, even looking at him you could see there were going to be ‘power couple’ type descriptions in the papers. Loki had just got to the bit where Clint the American Adonis slid a gold ring onto Darcy’s finger where a diamond roughly the size of Narfi’s head already rested when his phone rang.

“Loki?" It was Bruce, calling from the shop. “Are you coming in today? Only a whole bunch of packages showed up this morning. I can just put them in the store-room if you like...”

“Yes, I’m coming. I just... Overslept.” Loki looked into his mug. The tea had gone cold anyway.

“You should start going to bed earlier.” In the background, the shop bell jangled. “Gotta go.”

Loki poured his tea down the sink as Tony bounced through the door.

“Hey, you not going to work—Can I smell perfume?” He sniffed, reminding Loki of a small annoying animal. One with a goatee. “I can smell perfume! I don’t believe it. Did you actually bring a girl here? A real one?”

The way Tony was bopping around made Loki think longingly of a whack-a-mole mallet. A really big one.

“Was it the American? Did she let you try her American pie—”

“Don’t even think about making a Swedish meatball joke.” Loki snapped. “Actually, just do me a favour, and shut your ridiculous bearded face before I sledgehammer that stupid grin out of my life once and for all!”

He slammed the door on Tony’s astonished expression.

A moment later the door slammed open again.

“And thank you for the phone,” Loki barked, before slamming it in a definitely final way. 

 

~*~

The day hadn’t started well, and as Loki stomped out to the back, it didn’t look like it was getting any better. Bruce followed him, until Loki snarled over his shoulder, “Look! Just stay out of my way, you complete idiot. Dear god, who do you have to murder and leave under the floorboards for a month to get any privacy around here?” 

Ignoring Bruce’s hurt expression, Loki opened the parcels on his desk. He found the last week and a half’s worth of rare books, bought online and at auction. Finding books was one of Loki’s favourite tasks, and he always found the act of cataloguing soothing, and soothing was really what he could do with. He felt weird, and not the good weird he’d felt over the last few days. Also, cataloguing always made him feel a bit like a very budget Indiana Jones, although rumours that he wore a battered trilby to car-boot sales were entirely unfounded. Especially since Indy wore a fedora, Loki he hadn’t been able to find one. Darcy probably would have liked it if he had though. Loki blew out a breath, put all thoughts of disturbing American girls out of his mind, and concentrated on foxed second editions.

 

~*~

“Permission to enter the lair?” Bruce tapped on the wall by the door, holding out a cup of tea protectively. Loki felt bad when he saw the tea. It wasn’t Bruce’s fault women were all insane, after all. If it was, he was keeping it very quiet.

“I prefer the word sanctum.” Loki took the tea but didn’t look at him. Stupid Bruce, being all nice.

“Natasha’s on the phone.” Bruce also had the phone extension, presumably as back up if the tea didn’t work. Loki had a proper rotary phone on his desk in the shop, but Bruce had come with a cordless phone that Loki would never even grudgingly admit was useful.

“Oh. Why? Did you call her?” Loki snatched the phone off him. Bruce gave him his most innocent face.

“No.”

Loki snorted. “Liar.” He turned his back on Bruce to talk to Natasha.

“I’m very busy and important. What is it?”

“What’s up with you?” Natasha asked abruptly. “Bruce says you yelled at him.”

“Did he seriously call to tattle on me?” Loki looked back. Bruce was talking to someone in the main shop. “Anyway, I always yell at him.”

“Loki...” There was a scraping noise, and then Natasha sounded further away.

“Did you put me on speaker-phone? I hate that.” Loki started to rummage through the cardboard box they kept lost property in.

“I’m eating my lunch. Want to tell me what happened with Darcy?” It wasn’t really a request.

“Nothing,” Loki replied sulkily. 

“And then what?” He could almost hear Natasha rolling her eyes and somehow felt a bit better. It wasn’t like it was fun for him to tell, why should she enjoy it?

“I don’t know.”

“Loki!” She sounded exasperated now. Good. She could be so nosy. It wasn’t any of her business anyway. Loki could just hang up and not say anything. That’d show her.

“She left.” He found a Boots bag containing magenta nail-polish with matching lipstick. Natasha didn’t say anything, crackling silence down the phone. He hated when she did that. Loki unscrewed the nail-polish.

“She’s going to America to marry Clint the American Adonis. In America. In a marshmallow dress.” He carefully began to paint Hector’s toenails, holding the phone between his chin and shoulder.

“Did she tell you that?” Natasha asked, through a mouthful of whatever Steve had made her for lunch.

“Well...”

“I thought so.” Natasha cleared her mouth. “Do you like her?”

Loki frowned at Hector’s new pedicure.

“Well...”

“You need to work out if you’re just mad someone else got the last word for once, or if it’s something else.” Natasha’s line crackled as she picked up the phone. Loki pulled a face. 

“And be nice to Bruce.” She added.

“Why should I? He tattled.” Loki screwed the top back on the nail-polish and put it back in the bag. After all, someone might come back for it.

“Don’t whine. I have to go. Love you.”

“Right.” Loki mumbled. She hung up and he pulled a face. Natasha only said that when she was worried about him. He stared grumpily at Hector the Hanging God’s horrible magenta polish and then at the phone. Finally, he put the landline phone down, and pulled out his own mobile to dial Darcy’s number. While it rang he stared at the wall, replaying the night in his head and trying to slow his heartbeat to a whine. After a few rings, it picked up.

“Hello?” A husky male voice answered, exactly the sort of voice Clint the American Adonis would have. Loki hung up. His heart seemed to be intent on jumping right out of his throat and running all the way to... Some desert island somewhere where it could pretend it didn’t exist. It should really be more patient. At this rate, Loki was going to join it anyway, and it could have a free ride. Why go solo when it could travel in comfort in Loki’s ribcage? He stared at Darcy’s number very hard, and then put his phone in his pocket, where he couldn’t see it. Then he picked up the pile of catalogued books and went back into the shop.

“Bruce... You can go on your break now.” He put the books down. “If you like.”

“Okay.” Bruce was watching him carefully. Loki picked up a book, and looked at him exasperatedly.

“What are you gawping at? Either leave, or go and do something useful.” Loki pulled his keys out of his pocket and unlocked the glass-fronted cabinet in a meaningful way. Bruce sighed and left as Loki’s phone rang, causing him to drop the first edition copy of _The Bell Jar_ (slightly foxed, name written on inside fly-leaf) he was holding (luckily onto the desk) and fumbled it out of his pocket. He almost dropped the stupid thing as wellOn when he saw it was Darcy’s number.

“Hello?” He cleared his throat and tried to sound less like a ten year-old-girl. “Yes?”

“Did you just call this number?” It was Clint the American Adonis again. “Do you have any idea who this phone belongs to?”

Loki hung up, breathing hard. Great. Fantastic. Definite proof the Darcy Lewis ship was sailed. Maybe it would run into an iceberg. Well, it sort of had. An Icelandic iceberg. And she’d bounced right off it and kept going. 

The iceberg hadn’t been so lucky.

Loki picked up _The Bell Jar_ and carefully put it on the shelf. His phone rang. Again.

“Yes?”

“No, really, how did you get this number?” Clint the American Adonis, clearly now bent on stopping the evil stalker that Darcy had picked up. Well, this iceberg wasn’t going down without a fight.

“She gave it to me.”

“Look, don’t fool around. I’m not a nice man, and I don’t like people fucking with my girl. So you will delete this number, and you will never come within two-hundred feet of her ever again. Okay?” 

Loki wasn’t usually easily intimidated, but this time, it seemed that discretion was the better part of valour.

“Right,” he said.

Loki hung up again.

Double damn. He sank down onto his stool. He had been about to do something with the copy of _Helena_ (no dust cover, mistake on page sixty) he was holding, but suddenly it all seemed bit pointless. Even more so than usual. He was never going to be an American Adonis. He wasn’t sure he could even manage an Icelandic Adonis. Especially since Adonis was Greek. Greeks didn’t like Iceland. No olives. Or something. The shop-bell jangled and Loki jumped about a foot.

“Are you okay?” It was Charlotte, the girl with the bad taste in men. She was still lithe, tall and blonde, but she’d swapped out the little black dress for skinny jeans and a scoop-neck t-shirt. “Oh, wow, it’s you.”

“Yes.” Loki cleared his throat and sat up straighter. “How have you been?” There, that was pretty much normal.

“Good. I’m not stalking you or anything, by the way. I’m going to meet a friend for coffee, but I’m running a bit early.” She looked around. “I feel like I’ve found your hide-out. You know, your mild-mannered alter-ego when you’re not saving women from a date worse than death.”

Loki laughed and Charlotte leant forward. “Care to save me again?” she said, biting her lip.

Loki cocked his head with a smile he almost believed. After all, wasn’t that the point of most super-heroes? They couldn’t save themselves until a right woman saved them. And if the right woman was unfortunately engaged to an American Adonis...

“Loki?” Loki stood up. Darcy had just walked in.

“Darcy...” He wondered when it had become so hard to breathe in here, stepping back from Charlotte and knocking his stool over. This was wrong, this was very wrong. The way she was looking at him...

“I just... You know what? Never mind.” Darcy swung round abruptly and left again.

Double damn and blast. It didn’t matter though, right? She’d probably just come to tell him that calling her mobile wasn’t a good idea, because Clint was in town. 

“Wow, that was weird, for a moment there, I thought...” Charlotte laughed, and tossed her hair. “Did you know her?”

“Almost.” Loki picked his stool up slowly. “She... She’s got a boyfriend, I think.”

“Oh. Her loss.” Charlotte turned back to him, leaning forward. “Now, where were we?”

 

~*~

Loki took Charlotte for dinner that night, even though he didn’t much feel like it. It seemed like a bad idea to dwell on the past, but the past kept rising up like a bad penny, making him feel off balance, like a gyroscope just before it fell over. He tried not to think about it. Charlotte was good company, after all; funny even.

Loki took her to this little Italian restaurant he knew. He’d taken other dates there, but she didn’t have to know that, and at least this way Loki knew the food was good. They did the getting-to-know you thing over dinner. Charlotte was a vet, she enjoyed red wine, got salad with the glum look of all women who really wanted pasta, and ummed and ahhed girlishly over dessert. Loki ordered the wine, because ‘gosh, I have no idea’ and reflected that Darcy would have just had pasta and then probably had some idea about the wine even. But it wouldn’t have been obnoxious. And they would have talked about Shakespeare, or maybe even Austen rather than cats. Charlotte had a lot of stories about cats, which was reasonable, considering her profession, but Loki’s capacity for cat stories was about the same volume as his capacity for Tony’s junkyard stories. In fact, it was possible it was the same little niche in his head. Darcy’s stories never did. He could remember each one, exactly as she’d told it.

“So, what do you want to do next?” Charlotte asked over coffee. She looked at Loki from under her eye-lashes. Loki allowed a crooked smile.

“Well, we could go somewhere for drinks... It’s not that late.”

“Or you could come over and listen to that album I was talking about.” Charlotte tossed her hair back, exposing a long line of neck. Loki followed it down, playing his part as well as she played hers. It occurred to him that that’s all it ever was. Playing parts. 

He squashed this disturbing thought and said, “I could deal with that.” 

Loki got the bill, as was only right and proper, and they took the Tube back to her place. Charlotte went to ‘powder her nose’ and Loki took a moment to inspect the bookcase — a tiny, arty thing, clearly bought because it matched the wallpaper and the leather sofa. Most of the books had an Asda or WHSmith sticker on, except for a few of the improving-text-I’ll-get-round-to-some-day type. There was however, a well-thumbed copy of _Pride and Prejudice_ and a very old book of fairy-tales. Loki took it out and sat on the couch, carefully turning the pages, which had the pleasant sepia colour and smell that only time gives a book. Each colour plate was protected by a piece of thin tissue. There was a Libra Ex sticker in the front, which a tiny part of Loki noted would detract from the overall worth of the book, but then, they were never going to get much for something like this...

“It was my great-grandma’s.” Charlotte said, from the doorway. “Do you like it?”

“It’s very well cared for.” Loki closed it, carefully.

“Yeah, Mum only let me look at it if I’d been good, so I brought it down here with me when I started university.” Charlotte went to her CD rack and pulled out a CD and Loki smiled at the red cover of the book. Now there was something he could understand. Charlotte sat next to him, and for a moment, Loki thought of what Darcy’s place must be like. It probably smelt of scented candles and had at least one big bookcase. Then he looked up at Charlotte and realised thinking like that wasn’t fair. If he was here, he was here. Not the right woman, but woman who was right here. So he put all thought of Darcy and her American Adonis out of his mind, and kissed Charlotte.

 

~*~

Afterwards, she curled up into him, chin on his sternum in a way that was almost painful, with her arms around him. He felt cluttered and crowded, too sticky to touch another person. But there she was, like some sort of hot limpet. He tried to ignore this and go to sleep, because the only other alternative was thinking about Her. He wondered how Darcy would feel about being a capital-H Her, and realised that was the sort of thinking he should be avoiding.

“What’re you thinking?” Charlotte’s voice was loud, shattering the silence.

Loki opened one eye and considered his answer carefully. There were two ways this could go.

“Not much,” he said, cautiously, having chosen it over ‘well, I was thinking about sleeping’ and ‘whether Narfi would put up with a tiny top-hat’.

“I was thinking this was like, fate.” Charlotte kissed his chest, and snuggled in closer. She had a really sharp chin, and her skin stuck to his where they were pressed together, making his skin itch. Loki wondered if wriggling away would be rude.

“What?” Loki opened the other eye.

“You know, you rescue me from my date-worse-than-death, and then I find you behind the counter of a little shop in Notting Hill...”

Loki didn’t say anything. If this was Fate’s idea of a joke, he would rather like to find Fate and give it a good kicking.

“Don’t you think?”

“I don’t believe in Fate,” Loki said quietly.

“Oh.” Charlotte seemed to deflate.

“Maybe it’s something else.” Loki said quickly. If nothing else, he didn’t fancy getting kicked out of the house at two am.

“Mmm. Maybe.” Charlotte sighed.

“It’s a good something else.” Loki clarified. She hummed a little chuckle, and snuggled down next to him. Loki rolled over, she followed him, draping an arm over his chest again. He sighed resignedly.

 

~*~

Loki woke up to a different alarm, and early morning light was filtering through someone else’s curtain. He didn’t move for a moment, remembering why he was where he was, and whether he should be worried about it.

“Morning, sleepy-head.”

It was Loki’s opinion that the worst thing you could do to someone first thing in the morning with the phrase ‘sleepy-head’, but he rolled over anyway. Charlotte was wearing his shirt and her hair was damp from the shower. Why was she wearing his shirt? It was her house. Surely she had her own nightie or a robe or a towel or something? Wearing his shirt when he didn’t have another shirt to change into was rude, surely. Even Darcy had the decency to... He shut the line of thought down, hard.

“Sorry about the early start. I’ve got to go to work.” She kissed him, and got off the bed. “You know, I was thinking...”

“Hmm?” Loki yawned, and tried to work out where the sheets ended and he started. Why did she have so many sheets and things? Surely it wasn’t practical.

“You could really benefit from a hair-cut.” Charlotte opened a drawer and started pulling out clothes. “I was thinking like, that actor from Doctor Who? You know, David Tennant.”

Loki gave her back a suspicious look. “Early years or late era?”

She gave him a coy look. “I was thinking late era.”

Loki scowled. Late era Tennant spent his whole time looking like a cockatoo that had caught sight of itself in the mirror.

“Or maybe the chap from Sherlock...” Charlotte mused, doing up her trousers. Loki considered drowning himself in the pillows. It was entirely possible he might do it by accident. Who actually needed more than two pillows? Some of them weren’t even pillow-shaped.

“My hair doesn’t do that. It’s too curly.” ‘That’ of course meaning, do anything except look like someone stuck black macaroni all over his head. Any fool could see that.

“Still, I bet you’d look better without all that bear grease.”

Loki sat up abruptly.

“Is the shower free?”

Charlotte turned round. Her eyes widened. “Wow. What happened to your head?”

“Thanks...” Loki got up so she wouldn’t see his face. He showered quickly, wondering if the puffball thing hanging off the soap tray would spontaneously multiply or start purring or something. It looked like the sort of innocuous alien that would take over the world. He fixed his hair in the mirror with a comb he kept in his pocket. Not because he was vain or anything; it was just his hair looked better if it looked like someone had bothered to tame it. More professional, less scruffbag simpleton. Right.

“Your collar’s wet. Isn’t that uncomfortable?” Charlotte asked, coming up behind him as he put his comb back in his coat pocket. “See, that’s why I don’t get long hair on guys—”

“No, I have be going. I have to open the shop.” Loki cut in, as politely as he could. “I’m already late, so...”

“Oh right. I’ll call you.” Charlotte put her toast down and kissed him on the cheek. Loki stared at her.

“I have to go.” And he fled, feeling that possibly someone had missed something. Maybe it was him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this took so long to put up. I don't even have a proper excuse. >.>


	5. Chapter Five

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The only reason this thing has any fancy punctuation is because my beta puts it in for me.

To Loki’s horror, the shop was actually bustling. On a weekday. Loki stared at the quietly milling crowd and then edged his way through it, ignored. He identified Bruce as the centre of the bustle, and dragged him into the back room, almost knocking him out on Hector the Hanging God. Good.

“What did you do?” he hissed, staring in bleak dismay through the one-way glass.

“Nothing! Apparently we got featured on some blog. They said really nice things, considering.” Bruce rubbed his shoulder where Hector the Hanging God had righteously smote him.

“But they didn’t get my permission.” Loki seized on this. “I can—”

“Are you seriously going to get them to take it down? Have you looked in the cash-register? And a whole bunch of people are coming back to look at the books in the glass cabinet, by the way. Serious people.”

Loki glared at Bruce. Bruce glared right back. Someone was dinging the desk-bell in a polite yet insistent way. Loki wondered how Bruce had found the little spring for it. Surely he wasn’t getting predictable with his hiding places?

“Fine. Fine,” Loki said finally as the shop door-bell jangled excitedly and persistently. “I just have something to do out here.”

Bruce threw his hands up and went back out to the front. Loki plugged his phone into the charger and Googled ‘bifrost books’. According to the article, which came from a blog that was clearly popular amongst student-types, Bifrost Books was ‘quirky’ with ‘plenty of vintage charm’. And they spelled ‘Bifröst’ without the umlaut. Loki’s fingers tightened on the phone in outrage, and not even the ‘impressive range of books’ with some ‘genuinely interesting finds’ could soothe him. He put the phone down and glared through the one-way mirror into the shop at the people picking things up and looking at them and then and probably putting them back in the wrong place, all because of his vintage charm. What vintage charm? How was green wallpaper vintage? He sold books, new books even. They couldn’t be vintage, it was impossible for them to be vintage. His phone buzzed with a text from Natasha. _Don’t pout. It might be nice to turn a profit for once. Love._

“How does she know these things?” Loki asked Hector the Hanging God.

Hector creaked round in a semi-circle, looking into the shop.

“I’m getting a new god.” Loki told him. Hector the Hanging God creaked around again, and Loki heard the tolling of the shop-bell.

“Once more into the breach dear friends...” He liked to think Hector the Hanging God appreciated Shakespeare. The god of the put-upon book-seller should appreciate the finer things, otherwise what was the point?

The day progressed at pace after that. The new clientele were mainly students with stupid floppy hair-cuts that reminded Loki of Pepe-Le-Pew and clothes that looked like they’d rolled about in a charity shop bin. The girls (and some of the boys) kept looking at him and giggling, which was disconcerting. Did he have something on his face? He took a furtive look in the one-way mirror. His hair was escaping the water with which he’d slicked it down in little cow-licks and feathers. He looked like Betty Boop. What had he done to deserve this? He looked like one of them. Bruce caught his eye on his way past and grinned.

“Good hair. Successful second date then?”

“Shut up,” Loki replied politely. The last student mooched out. He looked round. “Wait, where’d they all go?”

“Lunch? School? Who knows?” Bruce shrugged. 

Loki tried not to feel bereft. The shop was better empty. Tidier. The books stayed in one place, where they should be. Right.

Bruce looked around the shop and rubbed his hands together. “What do you think? Victory lunch?”

“Victory?” Loki scrubbed at the glass of the rare book cabinet with his sleeves—who knew students had such greasy fingers? How did they even get that high? Were students part monkey? Maybe. Some of them did have really long arms. He didn’t remember anyone he knew at university being that weirdly proportioned.

Bruce tapped the desk. “Well, we made lots of money. And no one got ritually sacrificed to Hector the Hanging God.” 

Loki opened his mouth to say something incredibly witty that would definitely cut Bruce to the quick. Instead, the shop bell jangled. Loki sighed and turned round as the girl took her enormous sunglasses to reveal red eyes.

“Darcy.” Loki breathed. Which was kind of mad, because she knew who she was, so did Loki. But it had slipped out, like a prayer, almost. Or a curse.

Bruce stared. “You know her?”

“Of course I know her. And close your mouth, you’ll catch a fly.” Loki snapped, brushing past Bruce to steer Darcy into the back room. She blinked at Hector the Hanging God.

“Why does he have a teabag taped to him?” She sounded tired, like she’d been crying for a long time. Loki’s heart did a little flip-flop, which did nothing for the fact that he could barely breathe in the close atmosphere of the back room, made closer whenever more than one person was out there—one more person who right now, filled Loki’s world with her presence.

“A necessary sacrifice. Why are you here?” Loki started to make tea—not so much out of the desire for a good old British cuppa, more so that Darcy couldn’t see his face when she asked him to sign a non-disclosure form or whatever it as that would ensure his silence over their dalliance. 

“Have you not seen the papers?” Darcy sat on the chair that went with the computer desk. 

“No, I’ve been busy...” Loki watched the kettle. Suddenly he felt very guilty about Charlotte the vet.

“Oh god...” Darcy sniffed, took a shuddering breath, and Loki almost went to her, but he remembered the American Adonis and pulled the milk out of the tiny fridge instead.

“When I was younger, I was seeing this guy, and I let him take some photos... And...” Darcy’s voice hitched. “He sold them.” She blew her nose. Loki handed her a cup of tea wordlessly. He wasn’t sure what he should say.

“And it’s not the nudity. I did _Firefly Love_ for god’s sake. It’s just, I loved him, you know?”

Loki shrugged. “Why aren’t you talking about this with Clint?” He felt like he deserved a medal for not giving Clint’s name the sneer it deserved.

“I have, and he’s running interference, but I just really needed to get away...” Darcy huddled round her tea.

“And he doesn’t mind you coming to me?” 

“No.” Darcy gave him a puzzled look. “And he apologises for being a dick on the phone. He didn’t realise who you were.”

“What?” Loki felt utterly lost. Was there a chunk of the conversation he’d missed?

“I just had to get away.” Darcy sipped tea. Loki’s own tea sat forgotten by the sink. She looked tired. And maybe smaller? Not through weight-loss or anything, which was good, because she was alright the size she was, but deflated somehow. Loki came to a decision. Even if it did mean getting muscled to death by the American Adonis.

“You can come stay at mine.” He smiled. “It’s literally across the street.”

“Won’t your girlfriend mind?” 

“What girlfriend?” Loki finally looked up properly.

“You know, the Blonde Bimbette.”

Loki laughed, surprised. “I don’t—that wasn’t my girlfriend.”

“Oh, so you just pick up any likely looking girl?” And now that challenging look was back, and it looked cross.

“No.” Loki lied. “Or at least, you’re not a likely looking girl. I mean, you are, but anyway, what about Clint?”

“What about him?” Darcy demanded. “He’s my manager, you idiot. And that’s it. Christ, I’ve known him since I was fifteen.”

Loki’s heart shot straight up into the bulls-eye behind his eyebrows and did a happy victory jig on the way down. The American Adonis could preen and drink all the skinny lattes in the world till he exploded because he wasn’t Darcy’s boyfriend. She rolled her eyes.

“Men are so awful. Look, all I want is like, twenty minutes where I don’t have to say no comment to someone. Okay?”

“Okay.” Loki nodded. “Put your sunglasses back on. We’ll go round the back way.”

He rummaged through the lost property box, till he found the trucker cap with CUNT tastefully written across it in neon letters. He’d been planning to sacrifice it to Hector the Hanging God next time it was time to visit his accountant, but this seemed an equally worthy cause. He held it out to her. Darcy recoiled.

“I can’t wear that!”

“Why not?” Loki looked fondly at the hat. Bruce had banned him from wearing it in the shop, but he loved it nonetheless.

“What if I get caught wearing that hat?” Darcy folded her arms.

“Look, is this a hat you would ever wear?” Loki asked, exasperatedly.

“No!”

“Well, then, the press are looking for the person who would never wear this hat. If you wear it, then you won’t be that person.”

Darcy snatched the hat and tucked her hair up into it. She was giggling, despite herself. “That is ridiculous. This is ridiculous.” 

“Yes.” Loki grinned, despite himself. Maybe this wouldn’t be such a terrible day. He peeped into the shop. Bruce was at the counter, talking to a bulky man with a camera. Well, the man was talking. Bruce was doing a rather good impression of a brick wall. Finally, the man with the camera turned and left the shop, looking annoyed. 

“If anyone was planning on making a quick exit, now would be the time.” Bruce said, to no one in particular. Loki made a mental note to give him a raise as he took Darcy upstairs and let himself into Bruce’s flat. They opened the window in the bedroom and got onto the fire escape. Loki climbed out first and held out his hand, shuffling back on his hands and knees to accommodate her.

“Are we really escaping like this?” She glared at him. “I didn’t come here to feed your Indiana Jones complex.”

Loki rolled his eyes. “Were you followed to the shop, Willie?”

“Probably.” Darcy took his hand. “And don’t call me that. I’m so Marion.”

“Careful, or you’ll be Short Round. Maybe they’ll think you just made a book-fort till they go away?” She stumbled on the window-sill and Loki held her to him to stop her from falling. Killing Darcy Lewis was far less romantic than rescuing her. 

“That seems like a neat idea. Can we do that instead?” Darcy clung to the railing.

“No. Some of those books are older than you!” Loki started down the ladder first.

“I thought it was supposed to be ladies first.” Darcy stared down the ladder, her eyes wide behind the sunglasses.

“Why?” Loki concentrated on the ladder. It wasn’t particularly rusty—he at least took his landlording duties a little more seriously than Tony—but he still didn’t want to hilariously miss a rung and break his ankle. Nowhere in _Temple of Doom_ did Indiana Jones have to be carried to the hospital by his beloved.

“Because then you can’t see up my skirt, I guess?”

“Marion wouldn’t have cared if Indy could see up her skirt.” Loki pointed out, and looked up. “You’re not even wearing a skirt. Are you coming?”

“It’s very high...” Darcy swallowed. 

“You’re right. You know what, wait there, I’ll come back up. You can go first.” Loki started back up.

“Why?” 

“Because you should go first. Then I can have a soft landing.” 

“Oh, no way. Get your butt down there.” Darcy started on the rungs of the ladder. “I should have sent my stunt girl.”

“I’m glad you didn’t.” Any stunt girl would have only made Loki look like a wuss. Somehow. Possibly by getting off the ladder with a back-flip, instead of slipping on the last rung and seriously seeing his own death before realising he was on the ground. And banging his chin. 

“How far am I off the ground?” Darcy asked, above him.

“Oh, just let go.” Loki rubbed his chin. 

“Asshole. I’m serious!”

“You’re almost on the last rung.” He was pretty sure he hadn’t broken his jaw. He could still talk, right?

“Oh help...” 

Loki rushed forward and grabbed her round the waist as she came to the last rung. 

“I’ve got you...”

“I know.” 

She smiled at him, simple and trusting, and Loki almost dropped her, but managed to keep hold till her Doc Martens hit the ground.

“Thanks.” 

His hands were still on her waist. She felt like the most solid thing in the world. Something to cling to. Loki smiled, almost tentatively.

“You...” He stopped. “You definitely need a stunt-woman.”

“Hey. Says you. I felt you hit the rung. You’re practically a liability. A liability with mad hair.”

“Fine, you get to stay here.” Loki took his hands off her and turned away. 

“Nope, you’re stuck with me, Indy.” She grabbed his hand anyway, and pulled him round the side of the building, humming the Indiana Jones theme tune. Until that moment, Loki didn’t know you could fall in love with the same person twice.

There were a couple of cameramen lurking around the shop. Bruce was remonstrating with them in a very definite way, arms akimbo. Loki paused to check that Bruce had their full attention.

“What are you doing?” Darcy looked over. “Isn’t that your weird assistant?”

“Yeah... They had better get the message...” Loki grimaced at the alternative.

“Oh yeah, that shop-lifter...” Darcy tilted her head. “They kind of deserve it, don’t you think?”

The cameramen were shuffling off down the street. Bruce watched them with his arms folded. Loki recognised that look and winced—last time he’d got that look off Bruce he had seriously feared for his face.

“Oh, they left, that’s a shame.” Darcy sighed. “Come on.” And she tugged him across the street.

Loki shut the door and yelled. “Tony!” There was no response, although Narfi slunk round the corner. “No, not you, _kisi_.”

“Can I borrow your bath?” Darcy dropped her shoulder-bag and pulled off the cap, her hair tumbling down in sweet-smelling waves. “I wasn’t kidding about that twenty minutes.”

Loki gestured like a waiter. “This way.”

She kissed him on the cheek as she went past. Loki watched her go up the stairs, vaguely aware that his mouth was open. When she had gone up the stairs, he flopped onto the sofa and Narfi hopped up by him to headbutt him in a friendly yet meaningful way.

“What do you reckon, kitty?” He asked in Icelandic, rubbing under the cat’s chin. “What do I do now?”

Narfi purred, and climbed up onto his lap. “She’s perfect. I think. Is that possible?” 

Narfi continued to purr. 

“But that’s the problem, isn’t it, kitty? She’s perfect and we are not.” Loki rolled his head back in exasperation. Narfi kneaded him companionably. “We can’t convince her to stay, because we’ll never be good enough to think about asking.” 

Narfi flicked his tail. Loki tried to marshal his thoughts.

“It’s like, it’s like Darcy is an original Botticelli and I’m a jigsaw version of Van Gogh. With some of the pieces missing. And bits of a Turner painting dumped in as well.” 

Narfi butted his fingers. Loki sighed.

“I don’t suppose you know what a jigsaw is, do you? That was quite a good way of putting it as well. We could get one, and you could try it, and then you would know exactly what I meant...”

“Are you talking Ikea to the cat? Again?” Tony had come in, unnoticed.

“ _Nei_.” Loki said, abruptly. “Great, now I lost my train of thought,” he told the cat. He looked up. Tony was watching him solemnly. “What?” he demanded in English. Narfi startled and jumped off the sofa. “I didn’t eat the last doughnut, so don’t look at me like that.” 

“Whatever man...” Tony opened the fridge. “You knew that doughnut was mine.”

“The cat must have had it.” Loki shrugged, draping his arm along the back of the sofa in forced nonchalance. He might have got away with it, but at that moment Darcy came down the stairs, wrapped in Loki’s robe.

“Oh, your housemate’s home...” She had a pained look, like she was expecting a blow. “Hi, I’m Darcy.”

Loki tensed.

“Hi. You must be that girl Loki’s been sending himself distracted over. Good job there, he’s usually like that vile-ass fish pate he likes when it comes to girls.” Tony waved and went back to fiddling with the coffee machine.

“What?” Loki sat up, preparing to bash Tony’s goatee in the fridge door with or without the rest of him attached. “Hákarl isn’t vile—”

“Whatever. It totally is — cold. Kind of a stinker. Made of sharks. You’ve almost made him decent.” Tony said over him, apparently unaware of his impending beard-meet-fridge doom.

“Uh... Thanks?” Darcy looked confused. Loki wondered if he looked confused as well. “Well, nice to meet you.”

“No problem.” Tony opened the freezer. Loki tried not to feel disappointed. Darcy Lewis was wearing his robe. And had wet hair. Surely that would at least merit a high-five. Not that he wanted one. That would be demeaning towards Darcy, who was a professional woman going through a difficult period.

They probably could have got it in when she wasn’t looking.

“Hey, have we met?” Darcy had put her glasses on and was squinting at Tony. 

“No.” Tony said, in a very definite way. Loki stopped trying to work out the best way to find out if Darcy had put pants on underneath his robe and looked at Tony. He actually looked worried. Tony never looked worried. Even standing in the middle of a cloud of greasy black smoke and still smouldering, Tony didn’t look worried. Tony looking worried was new.

“I’m so sure I’ve seen you before.” Darcy took a step towards him, tilting her head.

“Nope, definitely not. I uh. I gotta go.” Tony grabbed his jacket and bolted. The door slammed behind him.

“That was weird.” Darcy shrugged, and flopped onto the couch next to him. “You know, your housemate looks just like Tony Stark.”

“...Who?” Loki tucked an arm round her, pulling her close. Even if he wasn’t perfect, he knew how to pretend. Tonight, at any rate, he could pretend.

“How do you not know that?” Darcy snuggled into his side. “Does Iceland not have celebrities?”

“I bet you don’t know who Björk is.” Loki grumbled, but not particularly hard.

“Swan dress, right? She’s like, a total sweetie; we sat together at some awards do one time.”

“Huh, lucky guess.” Loki squeezed her shoulder, mollified.

Narfi hopped up onto the couch beside Loki and mewed beseechingly.

“Hey, are you hungry _kisi_? Is it your teatime?” Loki rubbed one of the cat’s ears.

“Are you talking to your cat again?” Darcy reached out a languid hand to Narfi, who sniffed it for the food possibilities it might present and hopped off the couch again.

“Nope. Do you want take-away?”

Darcy hit him, giggling.

 

They ordered Chinese food for dinner. Loki even remembered to get the Special Chow Mein for when Tony got home, because if he came home and found out that there had been Chinese food without him, he would have been upset. Darcy ordered a mysterious dish called ‘Chicken Cashew Special’ that Loki had never dared order. It turned out to be a sort of stir-fry thing, and Loki found himself preferring it to his own Prawn Lo Mein.

“There’s this little place near the hotel that does a similar deal,” she explained as she curled up with her plate.”The Ritz has room service but sometimes you want something not lovingly prepared by a trained chef.” She was still wearing Loki’s robe, and flashed an awful lot of leg as she tucked them under her. Loki spilled sweet-and-sour sauce on his trousers. Darcy laughed, and Loki scowled at her.

“You are not allowed to be cross with me.” She picked up the remote and flicked through the channels. “I’ve had the worst day ever, and it’s not my fault if you’re all pervy.”

“Pervy?” No one had ever called him pervy before. Was he pervy? How did one perve? He had a vague notion John Waters was involved somehow. Maybe he would have to grow a little moustache. The problem was, his beards had a tendency to grow in a bit ginger. And patchy. Maybe that would add to the perviness. Wait, did he want to add to it?

“Are you going to eat? Or just stand there like a vegetable?” Darcy’s foot poked him in the back of the knee. Loki sat down and picked up his plate. He rarely watched television, even though the Sky Plus bill was the only one Tony insisted on making sure was paid. As far as Loki could tell, he mainly used it to watch _Dora the Explorer_ , _Top Gear_ and reruns of _Arrested Development_. 

“Oh lord...” Darcy laughed, a little embarrassed. “I didn’t even know this was still on TV.”

It was the Girl Detective show she had been talking about. He vaguely remembered it—one of his roommates at school had watched it whenever it was on, generally when Loki was trying to read or study. It had been pretty good, from what he remembered. Mildred the Girl Detective would start out trying to solve something relatively simple—the whereabouts of a missing library book, for example, and then inevitably stumble on smugglers or a ring of thieves, which she would then bring to justice with the help of her suitably diverse gang of friends. On the television screen, an incredibly young version of Darcy, wearing a bright pink top and flared jeans explained a cunning plan to a black kid wearing a baseball cap.

“Oh, Derwent. He’s a nice guy, does conventions and voice-overs now. I should really call him...” Darcy frowned briefly, and then grinned. “Look, there’s Clint!”

The American Adonis? Loki looked up sharply. 

“Oh, you missed him... We met on this show, you know. He was an extra.”

It was a terrible show anyway, Loki realised. And that just proved it. He picked up a prawn cracker. Really, he was monumentally not bothered by this. She wasn’t even going out with Clint the American Adonis. She’d said she wasn’t going out with him, and who was Loki to argue, especially since he still hadn’t worked out if she was wearing underpants under his robe.

“Don’t scowl, it was sheer luck we stayed in touch anyway.” The ad break started and Darcy changed the channel.

“Oh?” Loki didn’t really want to talk about Clint the American Adonis. In fact, he was the opposite of anything Loki actually wanted to talk about. 

“Yeah, it’s kind of a funny story. He was in this scene where he had to like, hand me a pencil so I could do a test. That was the whole shot, just him handing me the pencil. And the director just kept making us go over it again and again. Like, some serious Kubrick shit.”

“For a kid’s show?” Loki picked up his own plate and sat on the couch.

“Yeah, turns out years of excessive drugs had finally taken it’s toll...” Darcy mimed snuffing something off the back of her hand. “But yeah, we got to talking, he’s a good guy.” 

“Oh,” said Loki, stabbing a prawn viciously with a fork. Darcy rushed on, like Loki’s non-committal answer had unleashed something she’d been damming up for generations.

“I mean, okay, when you do that sort of show, there are only two reasons for extras to talk to you. Either they want to be able to tell all their friends that they know you, or they hope you’ll put in the good word with the director, even if he couldn’t touch bottom with a long stick. And, I dunno, Clint didn’t give off that vibe. He was only there because his Mom signed him up, and he was totally cool when I fired my Mom and got him to be my manager.”

“You fired your own mother?” Loki stared at her with frank astonishment.

“Well, yeah. She was nuts. Forced me to dance classes, singing classes, acting... I was on a diet from the age of eleven. Hell, I wouldn’t have graduated high school if I hadn’t insisted. She wanted me to go to some fine arts college and do drama, and I wanted to do political science, and she went completely ape-shit, screaming about the opportunity I was squandering, how I never appreciated anything I had, all that, so I told her I was going anyway and she tried to freeze my trust fund. So I fired her, got a lawyer just in case and hired Clint.”

Loki stared some more. It certainly put his own... issues into perspective. “And um, what about about your father?”

“Oh, he shows up every couple of years to borrow money and not return it.” Darcy smiled tightly. “So here I am, closest family is a guy I have to pay to look out for my best interests, because after a decade of Hollywood, he’s the closest I’ve managed to find to a sensible friend who would at least check before selling me to the highest bidder.”

She looked impossibly sad. When she looked over to him, still wearing the same tight-lipped smile, Loki thought he’d do anything to stop that look. 

“Guess you weren’t the only one not telling at dinner, huh?”

Loki closed his mouth. He hadn’t even realised it was open.

“I’m sorry,” he managed.

“Not your fault.” Darcy shrugged. “So what about you?”

“Er, what do you mean what about me?” Loki suddenly felt a swirl of panic. Did she know? How would she know?

“Well, what’s with you?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.” Loki started to eat again. 

“That’s not fair. I told you a bunch of stuff, all of which would be highly lucrative if you sold it...”

“Why would I do that?” Loki was genuinely horrified, even through the rising mist of panic.

“Money? Five minutes of fame? I bet being the source for something like ‘Traumatised Child Star Estranged From Mother’ would boost sales at the bookshop.” Darcy wasn’t looking at him. She sounded tired, and her face was shuttered against him. Loki suddenly felt very specifically alone. It was like she had left him, and he didn’t like that.

“No. I wouldn’t. Not ever. It would be... I’d rather never sell another book. If Jesus and all his angels showed up and said it was the only way to turn a profit ever again I’d burn it to the ground.” Loki touched her hair, tucking it behind her ear so he could see her face. If he could see her face, he could work out how to unshutter it...

She almost smiled. “You know, I really want to believe that.”

“You should. I hate that place. I only bought it to spite my father, and he didn’t even care when I did. I think it was a bit of a relief to the old bastard, really. He could concentrate on grooming Thor as his heir that way.” Loki shrugged. “And I wouldn’t have wanted to fight him for it, in any case.”

“But you get on really well with Thor.” Darcy pointed out.

“Yes, but that’s because it’s impossible not to. I once lied to him and told him Father Christmas hadn’t come, and he gave me his favourite Action Man as a present to make up for it. He didn’t even ask for it back after he found out I was lying.”

“Awh, that’s really sweet.”

“Terrible, isn’t it. Anyway, what’s between me and my father has nothing to do with him.” Anyway, if he stopped talking to Thor, then he wouldn’t have anyone who had to put up with him, and then everyone else would realise how awful he was and never speak to him again. Even the cat.

Darcy kissed him on the side of the mouth. 

“We should talk about other things. This is like a really depressing version of truth or dare.” She picked up the remote and flipped channels.

As they ate, Loki reflected that Tony had a distressing tendency to talk, stand in front of the screen, and in extreme cases, test motor-engines over most of the shows that Loki could be bothered to watch. The rest of the time, he was generally having to watch some movie or other because ‘you’ll really really like it, and you’re not allowed pizza unless you watch it’. It was different with Darcy, who didn’t shift about, wave screw-drivers, or punch him on the shoulder whenever something exciting happened.

“What’re you smiling about?” Darcy asked as she put down her plate and flopped against him with a well-fed sigh.

“You haven’t poked me with a spanner.” Loki put his arm around her again. She smelt like shampoo, and under it the smell of the bubble-bath that neither he nor Tony would ever own up to buying. Her hair was still damp, but he pressed his cheek to it anyway. He wondered if it was actually possible for humans to purr. It would be nice if they could. It was always nice when Narfi sat by him and purred. If he could purr for Darcy, then that would be nice for her. And she’d had a bad day, after all. And he couldn’t do anything else. He hadn’t even run her bath for her, like a gentleman would have.

“You’ve gone all quiet.” Darcy finally said, in one of the interminable ad breaks.

“Do you think so?” Loki surfaced from a reverie of purring jigsaw puzzles.

“You wouldn’t shut up all the way though the news. What mischief are you considering?”

“Do you like jigsaw puzzles?” Loki asked. He decided to leave out the bit about purring. Maybe if she liked jigsaw puzzles, here would be hope.

“I don’t have the patience for them.” Darcy shrugged. “Why, you a fan?”

“No, not really.” Loki’s heart had puddled in the bottom of his socks. No hope then.

Darcy sat up and looked at him. “Are you really alright? You’re being odder than usual.”

Loki considered telling her everything, and then realised that would go some way to making him look quite mad. It would be nice if he could preserve the image of sanity for a bit longer. 

“Yes! Am I to have no secrets, woman?” He folded his arms, pouting.

“Natasha was right.” Darcy grinned at him suddenly.

“What?” Loki sat upright. Good lord. They were organised already.

“You really can’t pull off brooding with those curly locks. You look like someone stole your lolly.” She was stifling giggles. Loki ran his hands through his hair. Without his usual efforts, he looked like some sort of mop-headed loon. One who had shared ancestry with a spaniel.

“No, don’t make that face. You got a comb? And whatever goop you use?” Loki tried to look like he wasn’t pulling a face, which was hard when you couldn’t tell what the face was suppose to be. Darcy got up, went upstairs and came back down with Loki’s hair gel and a comb from by the sink. She climbed over the back of the couch, and shoved her bare legs down between Loki and the couch. 

“No don’t turn around, we’ll never get anywhere.” She tapped him on the head with the comb. “Just, watch the telly.” And she started to comb his hair. Loki stiffened at first. Last time anyone had brushed his hair, his mother had threatened to cut it off till he learned to look after it properly, but Darcy was nothing like Ma—Moðir. She was gentle, and the feel of the comb against his scalp sent pleasant shivers down his spine.

“I know so many girls who would kill for your hair.” Darcy said, giving it a tug. She hadn’t bothered slicking it back, but his hair was suddenly so far down his list of priorities it had almost fallen off.

“Really? They can have it. It’s awful really.”

“I like it.” Darcy slid her arms round his neck. “And it smells really nice.” She kissed the rim of his ear and slid down behind him. 

As it turned out, she wasn’t wearing pants.

 

~*~

Loki switched the lamp off. He felt wonderfully drowsy, like he’d had a really good meal, his first in days. Darcy tugged him back to her, and he wrapped his arms around her waist. They fitted together like a jigsaw, one made by skilled jigsaw artists.

“Clingy,” he murmured, wrapping his arms round her.

“Shut up. I’m sleeping.” But she kissed his bare arm.

“Darcy? _Elskan_?”

“What?” She snuggled into the crook of his arm. It would be the perfect moment for purring.

“Can I keep you?”

“Hmm. Where?” Darcy rolled over till she faced him.

“Where would you like?” As far as Loki was concerned, you could keep someone anywhere.

“That sounds nice. Can I keep you back?”

“Yes.” Loki said, without hesitation. The word seemed to hang in the air, too valuable to be swallowed by the hush of the bedroom.

She kissed him. It was long and lingering, a promise of things to come. “Good. Now, can I go to sleep?”

“Well, not straight away, at any rate.” Loki kissed her again.


	6. Chapter Six

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Finally me and the beta were online at the same time. Can you believe it?

The next morning, Loki woke up feeling warm and fuzzy. Not even Narfi putting one soup-spoon paw right on his bladder could kill his buzz. He dislodged the furry pirate, who made an annoyed chirruping noise and climbed back up the bed anyway, using Darcy’s bottom as a handy trampoline.

“Ow... Huh?” She sat up, mussed and beautiful, and took in her surroundings. “Oh... That’s right.”

“Sorry.” Loki poked Narfi, who butted his finger meaningfully. “Say sorry, Narfi.” Narfi hopped off the bed with a flick of his tail.

“Do you have to work today?” Darcy asked, rolling into his arms in a delightfully naked way. 

“Well, I only own the shop, so no, no I don’t.” Loki pulled her close. Who would think about work when they had someone like this in their arms? She smiled at him and held her face up to his to be kissed. Loki did so, because he couldn’t conceive not doing so. Darcy shifted so she could tangle her fingers in his hair, deepening the kiss and making a lazy, happy noise. Loki smiled and she drew back.

“What?”

“What?” Loki blinked. One of her legs were twining round his and it made it very hard to think.

“What’re you looking so goofy at?” She was teasing him, her voice bedroom low.

“I thought I would put you at your ease by looking as goofy as you.”

“I’m not goofy!” Darcy tried to wriggle away from him but he held her close and started to kiss her face.

“Oh yes, terribly goofy. Goofy nose, goofy cheeks, goofy— Ow!”

She moved away from him, laying on her stomach with her head near the foot of the bed, and her feet up by Loki's face. Loki nudged them away and rolled over onto this stomach, closing his eyes. He’d say he wasn’t basking, but then that would make him a terrible liar.

“What do you do if you own a bookshop anyway?” Darcy asked, from the other end of the bed. One hand was idly stroking his knee, like he was a cat. Loki could live with being a cat.

“Loki? You still down there?” Darcy nudged him in the ribs with her knee.

Loki jerked out of a reverie about Darcy feeding him tins of tuna whenever he demanded it. “Oh. Uh. Avoid customers. Acquire books. Employ a Bruce.” 

“Don’t you have to sell the books?” Darcy asked, with a hint of teasing.

“Well, eventually. But first you have to hunt them down.” 

“I thought you could just order them?”

Loki opened one eye, frowning. “Well, yes, but I mean the rare books. First editions and things.” 

“You hunt them down? With like, the pith helmet and a big gun?” 

Loki frowned some more. Why wasn’t he more bothered she didn’t take his very important work seriously? “The wastelands of eBay holds no fear for intrepid Viking explorers.” 

“Books aren’t very Viking.” Her foot was wiggling next to his face. She had painted her toenails sky blue with little clouds. 

“You’ve never seen seven students trying to buy the last textbook in the shop. I’m thinking of taking bets next year,” he said, opening his other eye.

“Ah, so you are not a true Viking yourself, but the cause of Vikings in others?” Darcy stretched, wriggling her toes. Loki noticed there was a rainbow painted on her big toe and wondered why. Maybe so she could pretend she was a leprechaun somehow?

“That doesn’t even make sense.” Loki grumbled.

“Yes it does.” Darcy rolled over with a contented little huff. She sounded a bit like Narfi after a Chinese.

“No it doesn’t. Anyway, auctions are more my true battlefield; not spotty girls pulling each other’s hair over a copy of _The Belljar_.”

“Why, what happens at auctions?” Darcy crossed and uncrossed her ankles idly.

“Pirates.” He reached out one finger and stroked her instep. She twitched her foot away from him. This was an interesting result and required more experimentation.

“Really?” Darcy kicked her leg as he stroked her other instep. “Quit it!”

“Quit what?” Loki said, and turned his attention back to her toes. “Anyone who tries to pass off a Tolkien collection as complete by slipping Warcraft books in deserves to be keelhauled.”

“You keelhauled them?” Darcy was doing that wide-eyed look she’d probably copied off Bruce. Loki didn’t even have to look at her to realise that. He stroked her instep again and the foot disappeared. 

Loki peered under the covers for the missing foot. “Yes. That’ll teach ‘em to write dedications in a first edition.”

“People do that?” Darcy let out a squeak. “Cut it out! That tickles.”

Loki sighed and rolled over. “Yes. Completely destroys the market value.”

“What if it’s a dedication for someone famous?”

“Famous people aren’t nearly as interesting as people make out. Writing in books should never happen.” Loki opined, firmly, looking under the covers again. “Especially in pen, and especially asinine sentiments.”

“Asinine, huh? What about—”

Whatever she was about to say was bitten off as Loki found something under the covers that was far more interesting than a foot.

 

~*~

 

Darcy was in the shower, and Loki was making tea. He was experiencing what was quite possibly a perfect moment, despite it being before ten in the morning. There had been a number of perfect moments recently and he thought he was getting quite good at spotting them. He had high hopes of this one though. Hopefully it would never end.

Like the ghost of Marley, Banquo or even possibly an evil Casper, Tony came through the window. It was open, of course, the catch of was kept broken so the cat could butt his way in if no one was home. Tony’s hair was on end and he looked like he hadn’t slept. Actually, he looked a bit like a startled owl. Loki sympathised—it was clearly an American problem as well. Tony staggered past him and sank down on the sofa gratefully, shutting his eyes blissfully.

“What happened to you?” Loki found an extra cup. On a morning like this, he could afford to be generous, and Tony looked like he could use a drink.

Tony sat up, biting his lip. “Oh, nothing, nothing. Just er, don’t open the front door.”

“What?” Loki’s feeling of universal peace shattered. “What have you done?”

“Nothing! Honestly!” Tony held his hands up as Loki advanced on him, holding up a teaspoon menacingly.

“Did you break the front door? Again? Is that why you came round the back?” Loki didn’t put down the teaspoon but strode to the front door.

“No, don’t—”

Loki opened the door and the world went mad. People were shouting and there were lights flashing. It was like the whole of London had landed on his doorstep to try and signal to him in Morse code. He flung up a hand to protect himself from the dashes and dots being randomly aimed at him.

“Oy, who are you—Tony—Darcy—smile—hey—!” Tony rushed up behind him and shut the door like he was closing a particularly demonic hell-mouth.

“I told you not to open the door!”

“Loki?” Darcy was wearing his robe again. “What’s all the shouting?”

Tony had a rabbit in the headlights of a particularly large lorry look. Loki still wasn’t sure why the world just outside his front door has suddenly gone all... Lightbulb-y. But he was sure that Darcy shouldn’t see it. No one should have to try and decode that much Morse all by themselves.

“Don’t go outside.” Loki said. “You won’t like it.”

Tony still didn’t say anything, staring at the door in bleak horror. Loki wondered if someone had swapped him out for a stuffed version while he wasn’t looking. It would have been someone with a very odd sense of humour, considering the look on Tony’s face. 

“What did you do?” Darcy looked from one to the other suspiciously.

“Nothing. But seriously, don’t go outside.” Loki stepped in front of her.

“Oh, now I have to see. If it’s anything like the airing cupboard...” Smiling, Darcy went to the front door. Loki wanted to stop her, but it was like the time just around him had slowed right down, and Darcy’s had speeded right up. She reached the door like Speedy Gonzalez, and pulled it open.

The camera-flashes put everything back at speed. Tony darted forward and yanked her back from the door, slamming it shut on the babble of voices. Darcy was pale, staring at the door and then at Loki.

“Don’t look at him. This is my fault.” Tony dropped her arm like it was red hot. “One of those bastards must have spotted me leaving last night.”

“What?” Loki said, as his mouth finally remembered what it was for.

Tony made an annoyed noise. “Goddamnit, this is so stupid.” He scrubbed his hands through his hair. “You were right.”

“Me? About what?” Darcy’s eyes were flashing dangerously behind her glasses. Loki took a step back, before realising that he had at least six inches on Tony and therefore wasn’t actually protected from whatever righteous bolt of lightning she was about to unleash.

“I... I’m Tony Stark.”

Darcy stopped, poised to kill. “What?”

Loki blinked. “Who?”

“Well, don’t just stand there staring at me. I’m Tony Stark. The 'Missing Scion of Stark Industries,' you know... All that.” He made quote-marks round the name.

“I knew it!” Darcy looked pleased for a moment.

“Wait, who?” Loki was confused now. Wasn’t Tony’s last name... Something else? It occurred to Loki that he didn’t think he’d ever seen Tony’s name actually written down, as such. Had it begun with an S? Probably. It was a one out of twenty-six chance, anyway.

“Tony Stark. He was supposed to inherit Stark Industries, but after college he disappeared.” Darcy took a step towards Tony, and Tony took a step back. “I figured he must’ve got into drugs or something, because someone else took over the company.”

“Obidiah Stane,” Tony said, with a faint smile. “He is not happy I’m out of retirement.”

“You can only retire if you do something first.” Darcy snapped.

Tony rolled his eyes in a heard-it-all-before way. “That’s beside the point, which is that one of those scum-suckers took my photo last night and someone worked out who I was. I dunno how, but there we go.”

“Wait, I remember Faðir telling me something about some weapons heir... He said he was a genius though.” Loki regarded Tony disbelievingly. “Are you sure they got the right man? I mean, he can’t even buy milk.”

“Hey, that hurts.” Tony had the shadow of his old smile around his mouth. “That’s why I liked living with you, you’re like a blackhole of pop-culture.”

Darcy’s phone rang and she dug it out of her bag.

“Clint? Yeah, I just found out... No, I have no idea... Oh goddamn it, really? Yep. Fine. Right.” She dropped her phone back in the bag.

“I have to go.”

“What?” The bottom dropped out of Loki’s stomach.

“I can’t stay here. The papers are already speculating on me and Tony.” She started for the stairs. “This was a really dumb idea...”

The bottom dropped out of the bit of Loki’s stomach that he previously thought had already dropped out. It was confusing and almost painful.

“It was?”

Tony’s phone rang. He answered it brusquely but Loki wasn’t really listening. He could hear Darcy moving about in his room upstairs, and for a moment considered shutting her in there so she couldn’t leave. Because she couldn’t leave, not now... Then he remembered Clint the American Adonis and thought that possibly locking one of the most famous actresses in his room till he chose to let her out was a bit mad.

As Tony hung up abruptly, Darcy came back down fully dressed, looking at her phone, face set and shuttered. Loki’s heart, already as low as it could go, tore gently at that. 

“Right... The car’s outside...” She looked up at Loki for the first time. He’d never been completely transfixed by someone’s gaze before. She almost nailed him to the wall. “Look, Loki...” She ran her hands through her hair, dropping her eyes. “I can’t do this. Not like this.”

Someone knocked on the door, and the shouting suddenly rose to a fever-pitch as she stuck the huge glasses back on her nose. An aggressively protective arm reached out and around her, dragging her out of sight. The door slammed behind her as she walked out. Again. Loki stared at the space where she used to be. His insides felt rather like vegetable soup, like someone had turned on a blender in his abdomen. It wasn’t a new feeling, but it was one he’d hoped to never have again. 

Tony’s phone rang again.

“Ah jeez... I gotta take this...” he muttered. “I... You... I’m sorry man, you know?”

Loki turned his face to Tony. He knew he should be angry, but the vegetable soup was threatening to drown everything in its path, and he felt like he wasn’t in a position to lose the friends the universe allowed him to keep, especially to a flood of vegetable soup. Even an annoying, life-destroying goatee like Tony.

“I know,” he said, finally. “I’m going to bed.”

“It’s ten in the morning.” Tony pointed out, putting a hand over the receiver.

“I’m going to bed.” Loki repeated. 

Tony reached up and grasped his shoulder briefly as he walked past, already talking on the phone. The place where Tony had touched him tingled like the weirdest pins and needles as he walked up the stairs without really thinking about it, and closed the door to his bedroom. The bed wasn’t made. Well, it was never made, but now it wasn’t made for two. His robe was tossed on the bed. He pushed it off and climbed under the covers, pulling them over his head, hot soup in his innards and head full of pins and needles feeling static.

Tony knocked on the door. “I gotta go as well. I’ll be back in a couple days, but I’ll call you when I know when.”

“Right.” Loki punched his pillow a couple of times. He wanted Tony to go.

“You know, she might not...” Tony stopped talking and there was a faint thunk that was almost certainly his head hitting the other side of the bedroom door. “You know what, Ikea? All this sucks. It really sucks. I’m sorry you got dragged into it.”

“Right.” Loki curled up into a ball. He wanted Tony to stay, but the vegetable soup had taken a turn for the violent, and he was pretty sure if he moved at all he was going to throw up.

Tony thunked against the door once more, but didn’t say anything. After a moment, the front door clunked, and Loki was left completely alone. The phone started to ring insistently, but Loki was a champion at ignoring a ringing phone, so he rolled over, and went to sleep.

He wasn’t sure how long he slept for, but when he got up, his skin still smelt of Darcy’s perfume, the pillow smelled like her hair. He rolled over, trying to find another pillow but they all smelt of her hair, her skin. Images started to flicker through his brain, lazily and then faster and faster, all of her, her hair, her eyes, her smile, her... He tumbled out of bed with a thump and shot out the room. Her scent clung to his hair, to his pyjamas, and for a blinding moment, he thought he might be sick anyway. He went into the bathroom, stripping off as fast as he could, and ran the bath. He watched the water swirl in the tub gloomily, and then got in when it was half-done. The bath was old, thanks to Tony’s love of the little feet on the bottom, and every time Loki got in it, he was reminded that people used to be much shorter once upon a time. He folded his legs up enough to soak his hair under the hot water. Then he lay back and watched his submerged skin turn pink with the heat.

He’d always known it would come to this, of course. Loki was nothing if not doomed to be alone in the world. How could he not be? Even the people around him weren’t really his — not his real brother, his real... He flicked water at the twin mountains of his knees, and wondered how long it had taken the police to find him. If he strained, he could vaguely remember being alone, and in the dark, but that could just be an old nightmare. Perhaps it was a memory masquerading as a nightmare. That felt oddly appropriate. He tried to remember his birth-mother, but all he had was a newspaper article, a repeating one that the papers had run for a week before something more interesting came along. His mother was a grainy black and white picture of a smiling woman in a dress, a whiff of perfume on an (increasingly) beaten-up stuffed rabbit. She was gone, and when he’d grown up, he’d realised Frigga and Odin couldn’t bear the cuckoo in their nest any longer. Which was fine, because Loki knew that in their shoes, he would have felt the same. He had been a wayward child more interested in sleight of hand than sports, one who got a First in accounting at Oxford and then opened a book-shop... And now here he was, having a bath at eleven in the morning because he’d managed to drive off anyone who might care about him. Well, apart from Narfi, who stuck around for tuna if nothing else... Loki sat up with a slosh. Was there tuna in the cupboard? He stood up, and remembered his big towelling robe was probably still in the bedroom where Darcy had left it, which meant he didn’t want his robe anyway. He shivered against the sudden chill and wrapped a towel round his hips instead, because at the moment, anything was better than being naked. What if one of those photographers worked out the latch on the back gate? He went downstairs and checked the cupboard. Maybe Narfi would stay for Marmite? He scowled. Narfi didn’t even know what Marmite was was. He couldn’t even feed a cat. Suddenly, slammed the door so hard it broke and hung off its hinges uncomfortably. His insides felt all hot and cold at once, and he wasn’t sure if he wanted to cry acid or spit fire. He sat on the couch so hard he bounced. This was normal for him, wasn’t it, really? Par for the course. Every time he found a solid footing the universe found a way to whip the rug from under his feet. Darcy couldn’t do it? The hell she could. To hell with her. And Clint. How dare she just toy with him like he was some ridiculous jumped-up actor or...

Narfi jumped up onto the sofa. He butted Loki’s arm, hoping for Doritos or failing that, ear-scritches.

“Oh god, kitty,” Loki whispered in Icelandic. “I love her.” He was worried if he said it any louder, his chest would just explode. Narfi hopped up onto his towel-covered knee and Loki buried his hands into the cat’s thick fur. Last time he’d felt anything this big, he’d been sitting in the wing-backed chair in his father’s study, staring at a litter of adoption papers. That time, there had been no purring cat anchoring him, just stern oak and unforgiving leather. He swallowed and swallowed again, like he was forcing down a pill made of broken glass. The knowledge of his own isolation in the world beat at Loki, even with Narfi purring on his lap. The phone rang again, an insistently brash noise that was offensive to the world, let alone to Loki. The cat jumped down, offended, as Loki sprung up, grabbed it and slammed the receiver down. There was moment, like the phone was taking a breath. Then it started ringing again. Loki slammed it down once more. It started to ring immediately, insistently. Loki picked it up and flung it across the room. Narfi yowled and ran up the stairs as the end of the wall jack clipped him on the back and then the phone hit the wall, where it made satisfying crunch. Loki stared at it, breathing heavily, fingers flexing. 

It was like the clatter of the phone had cracked his thoughts into a billion pieces, effectively silencing them as they struggled to rejoin themselves. He listened to the rush of his blood in the silence. It felt a little alien to him, like he didn’t really know the origin of it, or why it should continue to do so. He almost smiled at that, because after all, that was almost exactly how it was. A trickle of water shivered down his back, and he went back upstairs to finish his bath in relative peace. It had gone cold, and he made a face. If he put more hot water in, there would be none when Tony got in—ah. Yes. Loki felt as though there was a deep hole in his chest, resting right over his diaphragm. If he thought about Tony too much, he would fall into it, into a sort of lonesome dark he wasn’t sure he’d survive. So he ran the hot-tap noisily, till steam filled the bathroom, and plunged his head underwater. The heat almost felt good, like it was cauterising the raw feeling inside. He found himself thinking of his birth-mother. He remembered sitting in front of a computer staring at a picture. It was the only picture he’d ever been able to find of her. She was young, laughing. It was a black and white copy of a colour picture, so he couldn’t tell what colour her eyes were. Her hair seemed to be dyed blonde, but Loki couldn’t really tell. He had stared at it for hours, trying to find the woman who had one day just gone out and simply not bothered to come back. The neighbours had eventually called the police, who had broken down the door to find out that the disturbance was his eighteen-month-old self, standing in his crib screaming his face blue. The police had used the one picture they could find that the neighbours could identify as his mother and a picture of Loki in a blue baby-gro in a hospital crib (apparently abandonment came complete with dehydration and severe nappy rash, who knew?) He came back up for air but didn’t bother to sit up, staring at the ceiling. In some ways, it was a comfort to know that he had apparently been completely unlovable since the day he was born. Well, before he was born, his father have not even stuck around long enough for his mother to learn his name—that space had ‘Laufeyjarson’ where the patronymic should have been. 

Loki sat up with a start, sloshing water back and forth, and started to scrub his hair. Even Odin and Frigga, who should have wanted him, had clearly changed their mind somewhere, probably around the moment they’d signed the adoption papers. After all, they’d always favoured Thor, hanging up sports awards all round the house, while Loki brought home consistently high marks and never even got a passing pat on the head. They probably wouldn’t have even come to his graduation, except Thor had graduated at the same time. Looking back, it was easy to see that Frigga and Odin had naturally gravitated towards their real son. Why wouldn’t they? Loki knew he’d spent most of his babyhood crying, and then most of his school days getting into trouble for not playing with other children, while Thor was the most popular child in his class... Even now the first thing you saw in their living room was Thor’s trophies, Thor’s picture. In the official family portraits (Odin being very proud of his image as a family man) Loki was a scowling ugly changeling, skinny and bony where Thor was well built and beaming, filling out the outfits his mother put them in. Loki hadn’t managed to find clothes that fit him properly till he was about fifteen. In all the family portraits he skulked towards the back, rightly ashamed of the unruly hair and baggy shirts that marked him out as not one of them. It seemed to Loki that no one ever thought of merely him, they always remarked how unalike he and his brother were. The golden boy and the changeling brat. It was almost like a fairy tale...

He stood up and pulled the plug. He preferred to rinse his hair under the shower, on the basis that he could shave at the same time, in the mirror he’d placed for the purpose. Some men were supposed to have beards. Loki could never manage more than vaguely suggestive fluff. He stared at himself. Eyes that came from nowhere, hair that he couldn’t trace, a weird angular face that it was proven fact that not even a mother could love. He pulled it all downwards, which increased his resemblance to Yoda, and then up, which made him look like something rejected from League of Gentlemen for being too grotesque. It wasn’t as though he was undesirable, Loki had always been able to find a willing woman if he wanted one, but they had never been... Right. Fun for now, nothing that would work out long-term. Maybe that was where he had gone wrong, thinking that maybe one day he would get a proper crack at it. It was sheer arrogance on his part to think that he was deserving of that sort of love, that sort of thing only came to other people. People like him should just concentrate on finding someone that would put up with them. At the end of the day, that was all he could hope for, the changeling brat crouching next to his golden not-brother, leaching affection in desperate and doomed love affairs with pointless women... The face in the mirror was sharp and goblin-like, cunning and sly, looking for an angle... His lip curled in disgust. He was barely human, really. Convincing himself and others of anything else was clearly pointless, blood would always out. He thumped the mirror, but the idiot staring back just kept staring, apparently as unwilling to learn from being smacked in the face as he ever was. He hit it again. The glass shattered.

“Goddamn fucking piece of—” He stepped out of the bath, carefully, and realised he’d left his towel downstairs. That just seemed to make it worse. He was such an idiot he couldn’t even take a bath. It had nothing to do with love, apparently he was just generally deficient as a human-being. Snarling, he slammed the bathroom door open, stomping down the stairs. He kicked some random pieces of junk, which more hurt his foot than anything else, before picking up the towel. Then he noticed he was bleeding. Good. Perhaps he would just bleed to death. Or just bleed out everything that made him so awful not even his mother wanted him. He could come back as someone else, someone that someone else might actually want. It didn’t matter who really. Just, someone. In the meantime, he looked for the source of the bleeding. A long splinter of glass was embedded in the side of his hand. He tugged on it, and made a noise that was almost a scream. It didn’t budge. Awkward. He gritted his teeth, and pulled again, squeezing his eyes tight and letting out another yell through his teeth. He found himself kneeling on the floor, panting, with the glass between finger and thumb, and hopefully entirely out of his hand. The gash on his hand trickled blood enthusiastically. He applied the towel to it. This could prove problematic. Eventually, he found a clean dish-cloth and tied it round his hand. This meant he could get dressed, and find his phone, which was in his coat pocket. He had about three hundred missed calls, and his voicemail and inbox was full. For a moment, he thought about how this phone could very well join the other one downstairs, but decided against it. Instead he dialed Natasha’s number. She answered after one ring.

“Loki.”

“Halló, Tasha-mín...”

“Don’t Tasha-mín me. Where the hell have you been?” Natasha demanded.

“In the bath.”

“In the bath? No, don’t explain it. Are you alright?”

“Sort of. I cut my hand. I think I need to go to the hospital... It hasn’t stopped bleeding.” Loki frowned at the dish-rag, which was not, in his opinion, doing a very good job at keeping the blood inside.

“Well?” Natasha sounded decidedly unsympathetic.

“I don’t know how to get out of my house.” Loki was appalled at how pathetic he sounded. These people didn’t even really want to deal with him, and here he was crawling for their sympathy and aid. He should know better...

“Fine, I’ll send Steve over. Pack some stuff, you’ll be staying with us for now.” Natasha hung up, no doubt feeling like she had something slimy crawling over her. Loki knew how she felt.


	7. Chapter Seven

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm just gonna throw the rest of it up-- it's all written, just beta-ing has been a logistic nightmare. It will all have been beta-ed, but that's only because my beta is better than me.

By the time Steve climbed in through the back window (still thankfully undiscovered by the pack out the front), Loki was sat on the couch with a plastic bag, rucksack and a proper cat carrier, which he’d had to buy for trips to the vet. (Narfi showed a distressing tendency to chew his way out of cardboard boxes, usually about the time the taxi hit the main road.) As Steve stood upright, the carrier spun a little on its axis. Steve took in the room, with scattered cushions and a broken cupboard.

“Hi Lok—Woa. Er... Did Narfi get on your head again?”

Loki rolled his eyes. He had forgotten to comb his hair after his bath, and it was now enthusiastically imitating a briar-patch. He didn’t even care.

“No.”

“Okay.” Steve watched the carrier perform another quarter turn. “Is that thing secure?”

“Yes.”

“Okay then...” Steve took Loki’s hand and his face tightened. Loki had finally sacrificed a tea-towel to the cause, and while the bleeding had slowed, the way the wound gaped like a mouth was a little disconcerting. “Shall we?”

Loki stood, picking up the cat-carrier, which growled ominously.

“Let me take the rucksack. I parked a couple of streets away.” Steve picked it up without looking at Loki properly. Loki didn’t blame him. He probably looked like a mess. He hadn’t even put on proper clothes, just jeans and a t-shirt and a pair of old trainers. It seemed like the thing to do though. Loki didn’t even really feel like Loki any more, like everything that he was had trickled away, leaving big boulders of unlovable traits that would eventually be all he had to cling to.

“Right.” Loki picked up the plastic bag, which had a litter tray and half a bag of litter in it.

They didn’t speak as they walked down to the car, or when Loki stowed the cat clumsily in the back of the car. He got in the passenger side, and buckled himself in. If there was an accident, it would be no loss if he was killed, but it seemed unfair to possibly smash up Steve’s car like that. Even if it was tiny and Steve didn’t really fit in it. Then again, neither did Loki. He almost broke his nose on his own knee-cap getting in.

Steve folded himself into the front seat. “What did you do to your hand?”

“I cut it. On a mirror.” Loki said, colourlessly.

Steve’s knuckles whitened on the steering-wheel. “Is it bad?”

“...Probably. It’s almost stopped bleeding.” 

Steve rolled his eyes impatiently. He grabbed Loki’s hand with a certain amount of violence. Loki snatched his hand back. He wasn’t stupid enough to let someone hurt him more than he was already hurt.

“Stop being such a selfish son-of-a-bitch and let me loo at your hand!” Steve snapped. Steve never snapped. Loki held out his hand obediently, and Steve unwrapped the towel, not harshly, but with a firmness of manner that made Loki flinch a little. He hissed between his teeth.

“Ya dumb bastard. Christ...” He dropped Loki’s hand. Loki tucked the towel back up. “Fine. We’ll drop the cat off, and then Natasha can sit there and worry herself sick about your sorry ass some more till we get back from the emergency room. For Chrissake Loki, all you had to do is text her...”

Loki shifted over in the seat, feeling an unpleasant stab of guilt as Steve pulled out into traffic again, honking his horn at a black cab, who honked back. Steve waved a hand as he put his foot down.

“But no, you’d rather just let her find out about it on the internet. I thought I was gonna have to take her goddamn chair away to stop her from coming over. The last thing she needs is to get caught up in this shit...” Steve closed his mouth, abruptly. Loki huddled in the seat. The silence was broken and thickened by Narfi, who growled softly all the way to the house.

 

~*~

Natasha was waiting at the door for them. They had deliberately taken a circuitous route back, coming almost via the other side of London, making sure they weren’t followed, Steve jerking the steering wheel with white knuckles and a thunderous expression every time he turned down another little side street. Once in the living room, the first thing Loki did was to stand to one side of the vibrating cat carrier like a toreador about to dodge a bull, and released the little catch. Narfi shot out as though pressurised, spat defiance at all three of them and fled up the stairs. Loki briefly considered a similar tactic, but Natasha wheeled herself in front of him, face grim.

“Don’t even think it.” Tasha warned him. Loki stayed where he was. The cat almost definitely hated him anyway, there was probably no point. “What did you do to your hand?”

“I told you, I cut it.” Loki didn’t look at Steve, and he certainly didn’t look at Natasha’s face as she pushed herself towards him and looked at his hand. Her face said murder, but her fingers were surprisingly gentle as she turned his hand over in hers.

“You should take him to the emergency room...” She looked up at Steve.

“I know, I was going to. I just didn’t fancy leaving the ginger demon in my back seat.” Steve kissed her, squeezing her shoulders. She held onto his arm, and the look of trust in her face hurt Loki’s heart. He was pleased for her, of course he was, that she had Steve and Steve had her, but he would never have that in any guise, and that hurt.

“Aren’t you coming?” Loki asked, in a tiny voice.

“It’s too much hassle to get me in and out of the car,” Natasha replied briskly, ignoring his wince. “I’ll keep an eye on Narfi. Don’t think this is over though.”

“No fear,” Loki replied, but when he looked up, she wasn’t smiling. Great. Another person scared off.

Steve was still quiet on the trip to the hospital. Loki stared at his lap. It was like the cut had leaked out the little part of him that could still feel anything much. He probed around, trying to find little corners of emotion. His hand, as though in proof, set up a steady throb in time to his heart-beat. 

 

**

At the hospital, Steve broke the silence first, stopping in the loading bay outside A&E with another jerk. “You’d better go in. I’ll come find you when I’ve managed to find a parking space.” 

Loki got out, and Steve pulled off sharply. He would never forgive Loki for this, apparently, which was actually entirely fair. Loki was nothing but a bother to everyone he knew, and eventually, Natasha would see the sense of it...

“Hey, mate, move. I gotta get this looked at.” The burly man squinting at him was supporting a teenager whose face was a sickly shade of green, probably because no one’s wrist was supposed to be at that angle. The burly man tilted his head at Loki, considering him. “Wait...”

“Sorry,” Loki said, hastily, and got inside before the burly man could say anything else.

Loki gave his name to the receptionist and sat down on one of the uncomfortable plastic chairs. His hand hurt now, and he was kind of pleased. It stopped any train of thought gaining momentum. Steve turned up a little while later, much to Loki’s surprise. He wouldn’t have blamed Steve for just taking off, abandoning him there and adopting Narfi as their token ungratefully grumpy friend. He sat down without looking at Loki and flicked through an old copy of _Cosmopolitan_. Loki considered saying something about that, but decided that really, there wasn’t much point. Steve would never like him again after this, and anything he said now would only make it worse. Being here, in the thick hospital atmosphere that made him feel like he was swimming through a custard of disinfectant and that pervasive undercurrent of illness... It was a Proustian sensory memory of the phone-call in the night—they had finally moved Natasha to London—the nearest neutral ground (and sometimes, Loki still wondered what that meant). Loki had rushed to the hospital still wearing his pyjamas under his jumper and mad hair up to here. Frankly, it had been a relief just to establish they had the right person, and not some other red-headed Russian. Fifty-word phone reports can only tell a person so much. Steve had been there too, big and reassuring, leading Loki through the hospital with one warm hand on his shoulder. Loki hadn’t been able to spend five minutes holding Natasha’s unresponsive hand—it had felt so fragile like egg-shell, and it was so _wrong_ —before rushing out to hyperventilate in the bathroom. No wonder Natasha had chosen to spend her life with Steve, who could sit through talk of physiotherapy without biting his tongue till it bled, who didn’t flinch when she had first swung her useless legs out of bed, with a nurse on hand carefully holding drips and mysterious tubes out of the way... Loki wasn’t sure he could bear to look at his cowardly face everyday either, if he were her. The changeling brat was as selfish as ever.

Two girls were sitting with their heads close together, poring over a mobile phone. One of them was blonde, and the other had a strange feathery hairstyle with pink bits thing going on. Blonde Girl looked up, glanced at Loki, and then blinked and looked again. She nudged her companion, and there was a moment of furious whispering, where Blonde Girl snatched the mobile phone off Feathers, fingers flying over the touch screen. They both looked round. Loki stared at a patch of the laminate flooring and tried not to think. 

“Excuse me?” It was Blonde Girl. “Is this you?” She held out her phone. It was a picture of Loki standing on his doorstep in pyjama bottoms and a t-shirt. His face was stupid, bewildered, and a little cross, one hand half-held up. He winced.

“It is, isn’t it?” Feathers asked. Loki glared at her. 

“Is it true what they’re saying about you—” Blonde Girl started. Loki couldn’t bear it. He gave them a guileless smile and spread his hands.

“Sorry.” He laid on the Icelandic accent as thick as he could. “No speak. I cut...?”

“What?” Blonde Girl raised her eyebrows.

“My hand. I cut. No speak...” Loki trailed off again, a frustrated foreigner trying to bridge a language gap. “I... English...”

“Sorry girls, this isn’t the guy you’re thinking of,” Steve finally spoke up, neutrally unfriendly over his magazine.

“Really?” Feathers looked down at the phone and back up at Loki, who smiled bemusedly.

“Yeah, really. They look alike, but this idiot didn’t even manage to learn English in time to come over for a holiday. And he wouldn’t be interested in Darcy Lewis anyway. Trust me on this.” Steve took Loki’s free hand. The two girls immediately gained a look that suggested they had just seen something fluffy.

“Oh, we’re so sorry, we didn’t realise... Enjoy the rest of your holiday...” And with knowing smiles they went back to their seat, where they started giggling immediately.

“You have sweaty hands.” Loki pulled away from Steve.

“Thank you must be one of the words they haven’t taught you yet.” Steve growled, rubbing his hand on his jeans. “Along with—”

“Loki Odinson?” A doctor called. She was wearing a white coat over her scrubs, and her nametag said Doctor Patel. “Come with me please.”

Steve went with him, under the watchful eye of Feathers and Blonde Girl. Blonde Girl actually waved to him as he followed the doctor into a nondescript office, with a skeleton wearing a stethoscope in one corner. Loki approved, despite himself. 

“So, what did you do?” Doctor Patel asked as she carefully unwound the towel. 

“I fell in the bath and broke my shaving mirror,” Loki winced as she pulled on the towel, it had stuck to the skin in places. “There was a piece of glass in there, but I pulled it out.”

“Idiot,” Steve grunted.

Doctor Patel got a damp piece of sponge and soaked the towel, patting at the towel instead of pulling it.

“I hate to agree with your friend there, but you really shouldn’t remove objects stuck in the wound like that.” Doctor Patel examined his hand, carefully. “It looks like you missed anything important though. Can you wiggle your fingers?”

Loki obediently wiggled.

“Well, you’ll definitely need stitches. We’ll get you an x-ray and you can talk to our resident handy-man, just to be on the safe side.”

“H-handy-man?” Loki looked down at his hand nervously. 

“Yes. He’s our resident orthopaedic specialist.” She looked at him over her glasses in a good-humoured way. “It was by way of being a joke.”

“I understood.” Steve volunteered. He’d been like that when Natasha was in hospital, making little jokes that set Loki’s teeth on edge, talking about rocket-power with the wheelchair specialist, asking the physio girl for tips... 

“That’s okay. Doctor humour is proven to only be funny to other doctors.” Doctor Patel winked at Steve. “And some Americans.”

“I’m not American.” Loki pointed out, with some asperity. Well, it wasn’t quite asperity. Diet asperity.

“That’s why you didn’t get it.” Steve rolled his eyes. 

“Well, let’s get you that x-ray, anyway.” Doctor Patel gave Loki a slightly sympathetic look, like she thought he wasn’t quite all there. She handed him a small wad of tissues. “Here, it looks like it’s mostly stopped bleeding, but doesn’t hurt to be careful.”

It didn’t take long to get an x-ray, considering. Loki sat under the machine in a slightly uncomfortable chair, staring at the wall, which had a cheerful jungle scene painted on it. He wondered if the monkey would smile like that if it knew the lion was hanging around. If nothing else, the lion would certainly be quite annoyed about being taken away from the veldt and dropped in the middle of the jungle... Maybe the other animals would not-quite accept him, holding out an empty hand and pretending like there was love in it...

The young radiologist bustled in, took in the wall and grimaced. “Sorry about the decor man, the room I was going to put you in... Someone was really really sick.” 

Loki shrugged, leaving a little smear of blood on the glass plate. He felt like something more was required. “I like the... The elephant.” 

“The elephant is the most majestic creature of the jungle,” the radiographer replied, gravely, as his fingers flew over a panel of buttons on the other side of a grass screen. “Now, smile...”

He took a few prints, coming out and rearranging Loki’s hand as needed. He looked about twelve. Were twelve year olds allowed to operate expensive machinery? When Loki had been twelve he hadn’t even been allowed to pour coffee, because of that one time he slipped and poured coffee into his brother’s lap. Which surely proved his point.

Afterwards the young radiologist showed them both to a waiting room deep in the bowels of the hospital.

“Apparently around two pm on a Friday is a good day to get injured,” Steve commented as they sat in yet more uncomfortable chairs. “Remember when Natasha fell down the stairs, and we waited for like, two hours?”

“Yes.” Loki snapped. She’d only been out of hospital for about a week. All she had wanted to do was go for milk at the shop, and Loki had told her he was busy. Which he had been, trying to win a book on eBay. Instead he’d spent the entire evening sitting over her bed, apologising till she told him irritably to shut up. And he’d lost the auction. “I’ll be sure to remember it for next time.”

“There won’t be a next time,” Steve said, with a sort of definite tone that hit Loki as surely as if he’d slapped him. A reminder that Steve only ever ended up in the hospital for Natasha’s sake, not Loki’s. He felt a miserable stab of guilt and hunched lower in his seat.

 

The ‘handy-man’ turned out to be a little ginger man who showed Loki the x-rays of his hand with the air of someone imparting a special treat. 

“Now, glass doesn’t show up so well on x-ray, so I’m going to have a look myself, and stitch you up.”

He injected Loki’s hand in a couple of places with a local anesthetic that made half his hand go completely numb. Then the little ginger man got a pair of tweezers and Loki had to look away while he poked around inside the wound with what Loki considered to be an unseemly level of glee.

“Ah, you see?” He held up a sliver of bloody glass. Loki swallowed. “A souvenir!” The little ginger man dropped tweezers and glass in a kidney dish, before stitching the cut shut with blue nylon thread. Then he gave Loki the sliver of glass in a ziploc bag, apparently disappointed that Loki wasn’t as excited by it as he was.

 

~*~

When they got home, Narfi poked his head round the top of the stairs, but when Loki shut the door, he stalked away again. Natasha rolled into the hallway. 

“All sorted?” she asked, looking Loki up and down.

“They gave me a souvenir.” Loki held up the little ziploc bag. Natasha stared at him. Loki wondered if he could make a break for the stairs.

“I’ll uh, I’ll put this away.” Steve hefted the Tesco’s bag he was carrying. Loki had bought Narfi more tuna on the way home, although it didn’t look like it would make a difference. Narfi was never going to talk to him again. Natasha followed her husband. They were talking quietly in the kitchen, no doubt working out how long they had to keep him as a mopey tribute to broken-heartedness. He would have just left, but that would have meant leaving Narfi and even if Narfi didn’t love Loki, Steve had tried to buy Tesco-brand tuna, for god’s sake. He couldn’t leave Narfi with someone who would do that. He sat down on the sofa instead. Natasha came back with a tray across her knees, balancing carefully.

“I know you’re drowning in your own tears there, but can you give me a hand?” Loki took one of the mugs of tea and the plate of cookies and sat back down. Natasha slid the tray to the floor and took a cookie.

“Steve made these,” Natasha said, smiling at them. It was a goofy little smile that was so sickening Loki was glad he would never get the opportunity to do it to anyone.

“I thought they tasted like steroids,” Loki mumbled, taking another one.

Natasha smiled. “Don’t be an ass. Steroids taste like medicine. These taste like butter and chocolate.”

They munched in silence for a moment.

“So. Darcy, huh?”

Loki choked on his cookie and tried to pretend he hadn’t.

“Nope, you have to talk about it.” Natasha folded her arms. Loki knew there was no getting around that. Fine. Two could play at that game. He shoved another cookie in his mouth and glared at his tea.

“Loki...” Natasha said, softly. “In a couple of weeks, or days or whatever, we can pretend this never happened, whatever you like. But you need to tell me something now.”

“She said ‘I’ll talk to you later’,” Loki said, and not even Steve’s cookies made to his mother’s secret recipe could cheer him up.

“And then she said I could keep her, but then she left.” Loki’s voice sounded small and miserable, and he was reminded uncomfortably of a mouse being squashed. Natasha’s hand covered his.

“She was always going to leave, Loki. She’s a Hollywood actress. Beverly Hills, not Notting Hill.”

Loki stared back down at his tea. “You’re right.” He put it down carefully. He wasn’t sure he wouldn’t shatter anyway, so it seemed like a bad idea to break anything else first.

“Loki...”

“I was always going to end up alone. I sort of went all out on the fantasy though.” He smiled bitterly. “I feel like one of those poor mortals who fall in love with the goddess or god and get royally screwed. And then they get creatively dead.”

“Hmm. I always thought you were more the Narcissus type.” Natasha put down her own tea.

“No, that’s Tony, he gets like one of those little birds when he spots himself in the mirror.” Loki almost smiled, but then, Tony had left him as well. “I suppose I’m more like Icarus.”

“Hmm. Depressing.” Natasha wheeled closer and launched herself onto the sofa across him. “There. Now you can’t fly too close to the sun.”

“Too late, I fear.” Loki slumped back, and toyed idly with a lock of Natasha’s hair. “Tasha-min, why didn’t I just fall in love with you?”

“I would have killed you by now.” Natasha pointed out cheerfully.

“Hmm, true... Or I would have killed you.”

“Nope, I’d definitely get in first. Trained assassin, remember?”

“Huh.” Loki smiled though.

“Hands off my gal, Iceland.” Steve was standing in the doorway of the kitchen. “I’m gonna make burritos for tea.”

“She was my gal first,” Loki said, irritably.

“I’m not anyone’s gal.” Natasha interrupted.

“Fine, but if you were anyone’s gal, you’d be mine.” Steve came over and swept her out of Loki’s lap, kissing her.

Loki rolled his eyes. His phone rang, and he looked at it like it was a bomb. Natasha craned to look.

“It’s Bruce.”

Loki leapt up. “Oh god, the shop!” He grabbed the phone. “Hello? Bruce?”

“There are packages here. I’ve put them in the back, is that okay?” Bruce sounded... Fine. Loki glared at his phone, and went through to the kitchen.

“What about the press? What did you say?” He tried to keep rising hysteria out of his voice. Luckily he was always calm under pressure.

“The press? They were nice guys. Bought a bunch of books. Some of them were interested in the glass cabinet too.” Bruce said, soothingly. “Don’t stress.”

“I... What?” Behind him, Steve put Natasha back on the sofa. 

“I sold them books. Why, what did you want me to do?”

Loki stared at the fridge. He couldn’t think of anything to say to that.

“Did you seriously think...”

“No. You’re not bright enough.” Loki snapped. “Look, I’m staying with Natasha and Steve. You... You alright?”

“Was that concern? Loki, I’m touched...”

“Yeah, yeah. Shut up.” Loki hung up.

“Everything okay?” Natasha was back in her chair.

“Yes. Bruce is being a terrible capitalist. I think he’s enjoying this.”

“Good for him.” Natasha patted the sofa next to her. “Come back here. I’m not done with you.”

“I don’t want to.” And even Loki knew he sounded petulant. 

“You don’t have a choice.”

“No, I don’t want to talk about it.” Loki was suddenly angry. “I wanted to be in love with her, she didn’t want to love me, and now she’s gone, and I get to be alone. Again. That’s all there is to it, okay?”

“Loki—”

“No, it’s alright for you, isn’t it? You’ve got Steve, Steve’s got you, you’re all in love through anything and everything and it’s wonderful for you, isn’t it? And all I get is—is a cat and a stupid housemate who isn’t even there anymore! And that’s all I get. Forever. So excuse me if I don’t want to talk about it!”

And he stomped upstairs. 

 

~*~

Loki woke up in the morning and immediately decided that getting out of bed was the worst idea anyone ever had since mint chocolate Pringles. So he decided not to, and went back to sleep.

 

~*~

Someone had let Narfi into the room. Natasha and Steve kept a small but neat guest room, complete with spare quilt for emergencies and clean sheets, and some time between getting into bed two days earlier, and today, Loki had decided that this would be the perfect place to spend the rest of his life. The quilts were the perfect barrier against the world, soft and clean-smelling. He would have cheerily stayed like that till the wolf ate the sun, but Narfi had no such sense of time. He persuaded Loki to get up with the irresistible force of almost thirty pounds of cat on a two-centimetre paw, applied directly to Loki's throat. Loki got up. He aimed a swat at Narfi, who purred, and led him downstairs, since clearly the human that couldn’t work out how to feed a cat before ten also wouldn’t remember where food was traditionally kept. He mooched into the open plan dining/living room, scratching at the bandage round his hand. He felt slightly light-headed, like he’d just got over a long illness.

“Don’t pick it,” Natasha said. She was working at the dinner table.

“Still stuck down here?” Once upon a time, Natasha had worked in the attic when she needed to, but it could only be reached with a rope ladder.

“Yes. Steve says when he’s done with his current project he’s going to build me the bungalow I always dreamed of.” Natasha’s voice held a note of bitter resignation that Loki recognised all too well. He gripped her shoulders.

“That great lunk will build a superb mud-hut.”

She smiled, but didn’t look up. “How’s your hand?”

“Sore.” Loki fiddled with the bandage.

“Stop that. Go and put the kettle on.”

“I will, but not because you told me to.” Loki flicked the kettle on and sat down.

“Sleep alright?” Natasha looked at a floor-plan and made a note.

“Not bad.” It was almost true. The bandage was abominable to sleep in. Loki had tossed and turned, flexing his hand against the pull of the stitches whilst Darcy flitted in and out of his sub-conscious. She would smile, beckon, and then usually, disappear the floor Loki was standing on. Loki hated that sort of dream. He was always fairly sure that if he landed in that sort of dream, he would die.

“There’s a first aid kit under the sink.” Natasha didn’t look up. Loki found it, and started to unwind the bandage, which was no longer nearly as crisp and clean as it had been when the little ginger guy had wound it on. It stuck a little as it came off, and he grimaced at the dried blood caught in the whorls and creases of his hand. The skin round the wound had gone white and dead, and he pulled a face as he carefully cleaned the area with a bit of kitchen roll. He held some gauze on and then realised he didn’t have a third hand to stick it to himself with.

“Can you help me with this?”

“Nope.” 

“Are you mad at me still?” Loki put down the gauze. He had been hoping that she wouldn’t be. He still felt weird, not right. Not wrong, but not right.

“Why would I be mad, Loki?” Natasha finally looked up, her eyes hard. “Four years ago you disappeared and showed up a week later with a goddamn book-shop. I didn’t know if you were dead, if you were alive, what the fuck you were doing! I thought...”

She looked down at her lap, fingers clasped together. Loki felt a surge of anger and dropped the gauze.

“What do you want from me, Natasha? What can I say that would possibly make it better? You think, I don’t know, I just tell you what the problem is and suddenly it’s all fixed?” 

Natasha looked down again. Loki felt furiously triumphant. “You see? You claim to know so much about me, and you can’t even... I...” He caught sight of himself in the shiny surface of the fridge. His hair was on end, and in the brushed steel of the door he looked like a skull, teeth bared, eyes sunken into dark blurs. He stopped, staring at himself. The changeling brat unmasked. He wondered what Natasha could see. Natasha was looking at him with that blank expression he had seen as the doctor explained the painful physiotherapy she would have to do, the way she had looked when she told him that she would never have babies...

“Forget it,” he whispered. 

“Loki...” Natasha unlocked the brakes on her chair and went over to him. He stepped back. “If I have to pull you down to my level so help me I will.” Loki stopped moving. She would as well. “Are you going to be alright?”

“No.” Loki knew there was no point in lying. “But I might be okay, eventually.”

There was a long silence. Natasha frowned at his hand. “Is that you trying to bandage?”

Loki looked down at this damp hand. “...Yes.”

“Well, you suck at it. Come here.” Natasha took his hand, gently. Loki let her. 

As she worked, she said, “Are you going to tell me about it? Properly this time?”

“Actually, I’m going to the pub,” Loki replied, in a way not meant to invite further conversation.

“Meeting someone?” Natasha asked with a sort of casual air that Loki really should have recognised as a warning.

“With any luck,” he smirked. It was just what the doctor ordered really, he didn’t know why he hadn’t thought of it before. He could get that... Her out of his system once and for all and never ever feel a sickening twang when he saw her face. And considering the popularity of her movies, he knew he would see her face everywhere. 

“Do you really think that’s sensible?” Natasha asked, mildly, wrapping a bandage around his hand again. 

“Yes!” Loki snapped. “Why do you care? You’re not my mother.”

“No, but sometimes I feel like it.” Natasha tied off the bandage angrily. “You honestly think pulling some tart will make you happy?”

“Yes.”

“Liar.”

“Well, what? You think I should talk about it? Cry into your lap about how unloved and alone I am, and you can stroke my hair, and mumble platitudes? Just no!”

“And you think going out and getting pissed is healthier?”

“I don’t want to talk about it. Which part of that don’t you understand?”

Natasha banged the first aid box down and it cracked. “But I do!” She glared up at him. “You have no idea how it’s been.”

“Wait, what?” Loki had the sudden confusion of someone who was preparing for a boxing match only to discover it was actually a dance-off.

“You! Suddenly you take off for three weeks, come back and announce you’ve brought a shop. No explanation—”

“That was three years ago! And I told you—”

“No you didn’t. You hinted, maybe gestured vaguely but you never told me what was going on.” She pinched her lips together and Loki felt sick. “No word. For three weeks, Loki. I thought... I didn't...”

Loki knelt beside her and took her hands, his anger washed away by the acid rise of guilt. She shatched her hands away with a little sneer that righteously squished any self-worth Loki might have been trying to save from the tidal wave of guilt.

“I’m... I’m sorry,” he whispered. 

“Yeah, well, you should be.” Natasha didn’t look at him, scrubbing at her eyes and sniffing. “The worst part is, you’ll do it again.”

“I don’t have the money for another shop,” Loki said, baffled.

“No, idiot. You’re just going to bury yourself in cheap sex—”

“Well, that’s what I want to do. That’s what I do do.” Loki really was confused by now. Women were just... Women. Surely a short affair was better than nothing, healthy even.

“Darcy Lewis wasn’t cheap sex.”

“Darcy Lewis didn’t want me. She realised she could do better, and I don’t blame her.”

Natasha did look up at him then. “You really think that. You think you deserve this, don’t you?”

“Shut up.”

“You do. Loki...”

“Shut up!” Loki made for the stairs. Natasha blocked his way with a speed that would have made the Stig hang up his steering-wheel. When Loki tried to dodge round her, she swung back, almost taking him out at the knees.

“Fine, I’ll just step over you.” Loki said, threateningly.

“You wouldn’t dare.”

“Do you think so?” Loki raised his foot, meaningfully.

“Loki, if you walk over me right now that is it.” Natasha threw her brakes on, more for effect than anything else. “We’re through.”

Loki knew when he was beaten, but he wasn’t going down without at least token resistance.

“I don’t want to.”

“Loki. You don’t get to play this game with me again. I got shot in the back and we never discussed anything more important than the weather. You’re my best friend. Act like it.”

“You act like it!” Loki snapped back. “You knew who Tony was all this time, didn’t you? And you never told me!” 

He wasn’t being fair and he knew it, but the last hot flurry of anger carried him on. “I thought you were all suspiciously not bothered about her being here!”

“What? We thought you knew!” Natasha folded her arms and did that thing where she was a lot taller than she should be.

“Why would I know?”

“Why wouldn’t you?” Natasha gave him a disbelieving look. “Do you ever pay attention to the world around you, or are you just too wrapped up in your stupid Mummy and Daddy never loved me so I’m not worth it comfort blanket thing?”

Loki stopped like he’d been slapped.

“What?” he whispered. 

Natasha seemed to realise she’d gone too far, but she had that stubborn lift to her chin that said she was going to keep going anyway. “And that’s complete crap, by the way. Your father loves you, and so does your mother. Your real mother.”

“How did you know?” It hurt to talk, a big ball made of chewing gum and broken glass was stuck in his throat, which was bizarre because he didn’t even chew gum. 

“After you... After you went away, the first time, Thor called me. I think he wanted me not to worry.” She looked at him pointedly and Loki stared at his hands. “Which was nice of him, don’t you think? To call?”

“And who...” Loki stopped, cleared his throat, wincing. “Who told him?”

“Your mother. It wasn’t like you left her with much choice.”

“You all knew? You all...” Loki sat down all of a sudden, slumping against the hall wall. There was a long moment of silence. 

“Why didn’t you tell me? You just let me—”

“We didn’t let you anything. You wouldn’t tell anyone. Everytime I tried to bring it up, you shut me down. What was I supposed to do?” 

Loki suddenly felt exhausted. He had been carrying the weight of what he knew for years, shouldering it all by himself to what? Save Thor from the upset of knowing his brother wasn’t his brother, just some changeling brat, keep his friends from worrying about him, make sure his parents didn’t have to take care of him... And now... He didn’t have to. He knees went like water, and he slumped down the wall to sit on the floor. It was like biting on tinfoil, it was indescribable, like, knocking the stone out of your shoe only to stub your toe on a boulder. His hands were shaking with the sheer force of emotion roiling inside him like food poisoning, and his vision blurred. He sniffed and sniffed, trying not to just... Natasha was there. Her hands were on his shoulders, her arms holding onto him, anchoring him like she always did. He clung to her like the last solid thing in the world, and tried to get himself under control. He wanted to howl and scream, but at the same time curl up under the table and never speak again. He almost cracked his teeth trying to do both, hot tears coursing down his cheeks like acid and bile. They dripped off his chin and burnt his hand.

“I just—I wanted a pen. I. I went into Faðir’s study...” Loki’s eyes were still screwed shut, glued by tears and the comfort of the dark behind his eyes, shielding himself from looking at Natasha. If he saw the pity in her face, he wasn’t sure he’d ever be able to function again. 

“And I found them, they were just in a filing cabinet, like they weren’t—they weren’t anything.” He sniffed, and gulped, and scrubbed his nose on the back of his hand, smearing up his arm.

“Attractive.” Natasha pushed a tissue into his hand. “What was them?”

“The adoption papers!” Loki barked the words out like vomit. “The... They were right there, in a green manila file.” He blew his nose. His voice was thick with the indescribable mix of emotion coating and sticking in his throat. “And I took them to Moðir... And she was in her conservatory, and we just...” He could smell the flowers. The flowers she was trying to hothouse and the tomatoes at the end that caught the most sun. The smell of tomatoes still made him dry-heave. 

“And she told me, she told me that she wanted Thor to have a brother to... To stop him growing up spoiled...” He trailed off, hiccupping. 

“Did it work, do you think?” Natasha wasn’t holding onto him any more, but her hand rubbed his back in soothing circles, like she had done the few times they had stolen from the liquor cabinet as teenagers. Loki had invariably got sick, but Natasha had a better head for drink, and a stronger stomach. He managed a wobbly, watery smile.

“And she said that... That they never thought to tell me, because they loved me, and they were more my parents than my... she could have ever been... And I just thought, how could you not think to tell me? I mean, I’m not their son, I never was. It was no wonder Thor had so many awards around the place, you know? I mean...” He shuddered. “I was just this lanky gawky thing lurking in the back of family photos. And I couldn’t... I wasn’t supposed to be there. I never was, I was just a playmate who never understood outstaying his welcome. So I... I got on the first plane out of Iceland. I couldn’t... They never even cared enough to lie, you know?”

Loki’s voice died away, replaced by the hum of the fridge. His head hurt, and his nose was all stuffed up. His face felt weird and stiff and somehow disconnected from the rest of him, and he was so tired. He’d never felt anything like it. Natasha dragged him towards her, and hugged him tight.

“The things you let yourself believe,” she murmured, and kissed the top of his head firmly. “Do you feel better?”

“I feel horrible. I told you it wouldn’t help.” Loki grumbled, disentangling himself from her and Narfi, who was ever-hopeful that there would be Doritos. “I’m going back to bed.”

“Shower first. I like those sheets, and I don’t want to have to burn them when you leave.”

“To hell with your sheets,” Loki muttered, but he dragged himself into the bathroom. After turning the water up as hot as he could and standing under it till it ran cold, he had to admit to feeling better, especially with the added bonus of clean underwear. He even shaved, even though it meant using one of Natasha’s emergency pink disposables. When he reached the top of the stairs, he could hear Natasha and Steve talking quietly, and decided that perhaps he should go to bed. He went into the guest room and carefully shut the door. The bed was as he left it, but he didn’t feel like getting into it just yet. He was oddly restless, pacing the small space around the bed. He picked up a book he’d brought with him, stared at a couple of pages without reading them and put it down again. Then he picked up his phone and switched it on. There were hundreds of messages, hundreds of missed calls. Maybe it would just be easier to get a new phone number. The thought of pressing ‘three’ hundreds of times to empty his voicemail made him want to throw the damn thing through the window on principle. Instead, he dialled international.

“Mamma.” He took a moment to savour the word. He hadn’t said it for three years. “Hei.”


	8. Chapter Eight

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This is it! The big finish. Hopefully it's a bang, not a whimper. Beta'd hard and fast like the little bitch that I am.

Loki spent a lot of the next week asleep. He didn’t mean to, knew it was probably healthier not to, but it was like that single confession had drained him of any desire to talk, or even really do much more than drink tea and stare out of the window. Anyway, he couldn’t go back yet; apparently the paparazzi were still hanging around his shop and house like really big flies. Loki had suggested going after them with an enormous fly-swatter, but not in a way that suggested he was joking. He watched television occasionally, flinching every time they showed an advert for Darcy’s new movie. He hated that, hated that she could do that, even when she wasn’t here, was never going to be there again. It was rude, is what it was. He had the decency to stay out of her life, why couldn’t she do the same for him? In the end he stopped watching television. It seemed easier that way. He called his mother almost every day, on the basis that they had three years to catch up on, and it would be nice to have more conversations where no one was crying. Then one surprisingly sunny day, when Loki was reading in the living room and almost feeling normal, Thor came by.

“Hello, brother,” he said, hesitantly.

Loki punched him very hard in the face, and Thor staggered back, clutching his nose. Loki reached out again, and hugged him very hard, even though it meant smearing Thor’s blood on his jumper. 

Thor hugged him back just as strongly, and then pulled back, fumbling for a tissue in his expensive suit.

“Did that help?” he asked.

“...Sort of.” Loki pulled out a few tissues from the box of Kleenex on the coffee-table and handed them to Thor. “Don’t use your handkerchief, imagine if it fell out during your next business meeting, you’d look like you were in a fight club.”

Thor smiled, winced, and held the tissues to his nose.

“You shouldn’t use a handkerchief anyway, you’re not sixty yet.” Loki said, more for show than anything else. Thor might change his mind and lamp him back.

“I only have a handkerchief because you always end up making something bleed.” Thor grinned. “You were quite a sneaky fighter.”

“If I recall, it was you who always got the sword. I had to resort to guerilla tactics.” Loki retorted, and then stopped. Some of his earliest memories involved racing round the garden after dragons and harpies, and later on, their cousin Sif, deadliest of foes. Except she hadn’t been his cousin...

“You knew though, didn’t you?” Loki said, in a low voice. 

Thor dropped his gaze. “Yes.”

The next words were dragged out of four years of gut-knotting confusion and hatred. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

Thor looked at his big hands. Loki had never seen his brother so discomforted, even when Fri— Mamma had found his stash of ‘specialist’ magazines under the bed. “Because... You were hurting so much. From Mamma and Pabbi. I... I wanted to be there for you instead.”

Loki stared at his feet. That was so typical of Thor. He sort of wanted to punch him again.

“And you didn’t know before that?”

“What?”

“What do you mean, what? All I’ve been hearing is that everyone knew that I was the adopted one, everyone knew I was the cuckoo in the nest except for me.” He advanced on Thor, waving a finger. “You are supposed to be my big brother. You’re supposed to look out for me! How could you never mention it?”

Thor backed up. “Because... You were two when you came to us! I thought everyone’s baby brother came home all ready to play and run about. When I saw Sif, I thought she was broken!”

That drew a noise that sounded somewhere between a snort of laughter and a splutter of pain out of Loki.

“Sif is broken. I should have shaved off her eyebrows as well.”

“You’d have only got in worse trouble.” Thor reminded him, smiling for the first time.

“Pft, trouble. I was made for trouble.” Loki waved a hand, and for a moment it was almost like old times. Of course, Thor had to ruin it.

“Remember when we shared a room, and you told me there was a demon in the cupboard? And then when I didn’t believe you, you rigged up that cotton to make the door open by itself.”

“The only reason I got into trouble is because you attacked the door like a big lemming.” Loki said, grumpily, starting to relax.

“And Moðir came in and you kept saying ‘Frigga, I didn’t know he would attack the door!’ like that meant it was all my fault.”

“Well, it was.” Loki retorted. “Wait, Frigga? That seems...”

“Oh, you didn’t call her Moðir for at least a year. She was always Frigga.”

Loki’s heart dropped abruptly. “No, I never...” And then he remembered. Waking up in the night, crying over... A nightmare? Probably, he remembered a lot of nightmares. Crying for his mother, anyway. And Frigga would come in, and that wasn’t right, because...

“Oh.” Loki felt sick, like his stomach had been replaced by snakes. He sat on the floor abruptly. “Oh...”

Thor was watching him anxiously. “Brother?”

“Oh, shut up, would you? For once? Just for once?” Loki spat. If only he could actually spit acid, rid his mouth of the taste of the lies. 

Thor bowed his head again. He looked so contrite it made Loki want to pick up a vase and hit him with it. He felt all mixed up, like he was in a snow-globe a child was vigorously shaking. And Thor was just sitting there like some big stupid lump. How dare he? How dare he just go all quiet like that? It was unconscionable. It was downright rude.

“Well?” He snapped. “Say something!”

“I... You never seemed to want to talk about it. So Pabbi said that...”

“Odin—” Loki began, venomously, but Thor held up a hand. Loki ignored it. “Odin—”

“Let me speak, brother. Faðir said that if you would talk about it when you were good and ready. It never occurred to any of us that you might have forgotten.”

“I was two, Thor! I could barely make a full sentence, how was I supposed to remember...” Loki broke off, choking on the nightmares of the past.

Thor spoke quickly now, before Loki could clear his throat of cobwebs. “Faðir looked for your mother, all over. He sent out the best to try and find her, and when he couldn’t... He said we shouldn’t bring it up, just to hurt you with the loss. He said if you wanted to know... You would ask.”

Loki didn’t say anything. Thor’s voice rumbled and echoed round the room and through his head like the start of an avalanche.

“Faðir always loved you the best. He wanted you to be happy.”

“Do I look happy?” Loki asked, looking up at his brother with red-rimmed eyes and blood on his jumper. 

“Actually, you’re looking kind of puffy.”

Loki threw the book at him.

They spoke for most of the afternoon, in stumbling sentences, awkward silences, and more than one language. It was probably the clearest conversation they’d had in years. 

After Thor left, Loki went back to bed. No one, not even in his books, ever told him how brain-flatteningly wrung out this stuff made you feel.

A few days later, Bruce called and said that no one was waiting for him when he opened the shop that morning. Loki went back to work the very next day. He was fed up of sleeping, and just slouching around in his pyjamas feeling sorry for himself, even if he had earned the self-pity, it was a cloying taste in his mouth now. So he rounded up Narfi, and Steve took him the long way home. The house smelt unaired, a curious mix of motor oil and dust. Loki opened a couple of windows and cleaned up the glass in the bathroom, carefully. Narfi stalked from room to room in a proprietary manner and then settled on the couch. The bed-sheets still smelled of her. Loki put them in a black rubbish bag and put them through two cycles at the laundrette. That night, he ate Indian food. Narfi had doner meat with mayonnaise. He turned the television up loud and watched reruns of _Have I Got News For You_ on Dave. Without the Goateed Pimpernel banging about, it was too quiet, but it would do.

 

~*~

Loki spent most of his first proper day back in the shop not hiding. That was very emphatically not what he was doing. Anyway, there was an awful lot of paperwork to get through. Bruce had been very slack in that area, apparently completely ignoring all of it in favour of selling all their books. Loki had shouted at him about it until he felt better, and was now engaged in scaling the mountain of post that took up an entire rickety card-table in the back room. 

“Do you want tea?” Bruce put his head round the doorway. His welcome home present to Loki had been a bar of fruit and nut chocolate.

“Tea is not going to forgive you this mess.” Loki growled, tossing his pen onto the desk that took up half the back room. The computer monitor wobbled as Bruce stood on a loose floorboard.

“You always say I do it all wrong.” Bruce shrugged, switching the kettle on and leaning against the counter so he could see out of the one way mirror into the shop.

“That’s because you do.” Loki ran his hands through his hair and stretched luxuriously. Bruce smiled and shrugged again and got mugs out. Loki watched him carefully. You never knew with the Americans — he’d heard some of them made tea in the microwave like futuristic savages.

“You didn’t sell me out then.” Loki picked up his pen and twiddled it, idly.

“What?” Bruce looked round from where he was putting the milk away.

“Well, I’ll bet you could have made more in a five minute interview than you ever would in five months here.” Loki pressed a couple of keys on the computer and it grumbled at him.

“Why would I do that?” Bruce cocked his head, looking puzzled. “You’re my boss.”

“Oh.” Loki felt himself beginning to blush, absurdly puzzled. “You’re an idiot. Always go for the money.”

He stood up abruptly, and Hector the Hanging God kneed him in the ear.

“Did that hurt?” Bruce asked, innocently.

“Shut up.”

 

Tony still wasn’t back, and having all his junk around without him in the centre of the scrap-yard explosion just seemed to intensify it, underline it with a marker-pen. Even Narfi looked vaguely perturbed. Loki found himself putting on the television when he got home like an old person living alone with the cat. He was watching the six o’clock news alone when his phone went off. It was an email from Tony.

`To: flatpackviking@smail.com`   
`From: tonythetremendous@smail.com`

`Hey Ikea`

` I’m coming home in the next couple days. I bet you’ve really missed me and turned into some kind of grumpy old man hermit while I’ve been gone. I’ve been hanging out with this chick called Pepper. She’s on the board for Stark Industries and she’s been showing me some very interesting paperwork that my dear Uncle Obi didn’t tell me about. I think Tasha would like her, she’s a mean shot with a clipboard. Anyway, I gotta go, Pepper wants to look at my wardrobe for tonight. I told her I was never in the closet to begin with but I don’t think she got it. I’ll see you later.`

`~xx The Most Handsome Man You’ll Ever Meet xx~`

Loki was annoyed by the stupid goatee’s assumption that Loki missed him. Why would he miss him? He’d left a half-disassembled microwave on the coffee table, for Christ’s sake. How could anyone miss that sort of annoying short person clutter? Loki caught a glimpse of himself in the hall mirror. He looked pleased, presumably because Tony coming home meant he might tidy the food processor he’d disembowelled on the stairs. That was definitely the reason. 

Right.

 

~*~

Two days later, Loki no longer cared about the food processor. He promised Hector the Hanging God he would clean up the food processor gladly if Tony could suffer from some sort of goatee-specific bird strike on the plane. Then maybe he might stop calling.

“I’m in the airport!”

Loki gave the phone an irritated look. Some of the look must have spilled over because a nearby student suddenly looked a little worried and guiltily put down the copy of _Sharpe’s Havoc_ she was perusing.

Tony’s voice crackled insistently down the line. “Loki?”

Loki raised his eyes to heaven. There were no answers, except for the mysterious stain on the ceiling no one would own up to. “Yes, I’m still here. I just don’t understand how you being in the airport now is different to being in the airport fifteen minutes ago.”

“Well, I’m in a different part of the airport now.”

“You know what, I’ve changed my mind. Stay in America.” Loki hung up, and the door jingled. Presumably back-up for the nervous student, who was hiding in the fantasy section trying not to catch his eye. Or maybe Bruce was back from his lunch-break, that would be even better. He looked up. 

Oh.

Darcy Lewis was standing there, wearing a knitted beanie and fingerless gloves and holding a box. She took in the Tall People section (No ladder provided) and the Adults Only Curtain (Minors will be fed to the Jabberwocky).

“Hi,” she said, quietly.

“What are you doing here?” Loki asked, stiffly. There was a buzzing noise in his head.

“I uh, I’m going back to America today.”

“Well done.” Loki folded his arms, and bit the inside of his lip. The pain, sharp and immediate, made him feel less like someone had filled his face with local anesthetic, which was probably a good thing, considering he hadn’t even been to the dentist recently.

“Don’t do that,” Darcy said, softly. Loki felt a stab of anger. She wasn’t allowed to sound hurt. She was the one that left.

“I... I wanted to apologise. For everything. I’ve behaved abominably.” Darcy continued. She was very pale, and very sad, and the fact that Loki felt bad about that just made him angrier. It wasn’t fair, it wasn’t fair she got to leave and never think about him again, and he was stuck in this shop, where he saw her ghost every goddamn day, dark haired students or a flash of blue out the corner of his eye...

“Yes. You did. Is that all?” Loki interrupted his own thoughts. He didn’t want to hear this. He didn’t want to think this. He just wanted...

“I brought you this.” She thrust the box at him. He didn’t take it. “I know it can’t make up for it, but still...”

Loki stared at her. She put the box on the desk. He turned his gaze down like she’d laid a bomb between them. 

“Right. Well. Thank you,” he said, not looking up, eyes fixed on the box. He thought perhaps he was solidifying, a statue with one hand resting lightly on the desk, the other holding his mobile. He had to move, or he’d be stuck forever. He reached out for the box.

“Oh, don’t open it yet. It’ll be like, totally awkward.”

“Yes, we wouldn’t want that, would we?” Loki pulled his hand back, where it dangled uselessly. He tried to put it in his pocket, which didn’t work. If only it would just come off, and stop just being in the way...

“Well, a little, yeah. Look, I’m... I’m not good at this. Being close to people. I mean, I have to pay my best friend to look out for me, you know? And all the people I meet, they all want a little piece of me, you know? Like, I feel like I gotta cling onto what I have. And then I wanted to give you the rest of me and I... You’re so...” She trailed off and glared at him, half-humourously. “You’re so...”

She stopped, clasping and unclasping her hands together. “Do you think I’m crazy for being scared of feeling right?”

Loki almost said ‘yes’, but even he could see that would be cruel. Darcy looked down at her clenched hands.

“And you didn’t even want to go out on a date! You said, let’s stay in and get a take-away. Do you know how often that happens? They all want to be seen out with the 'child star turned screen goddess'.” She put disdainful air-quotes round the last part. “You just wanted to eat take-away and watch frigging Coronation Street. I don’t even know what Coronation Street is! It was like you didn’t care at all.”

“I didn’t.” Loki said, abruptly.

“I know. And I’m sorry I didn’t believe that.” 

“Well, you should be.”

"When I got back to the hotel, I remembered how you tried— you both tried to get me to stay indoors... ”

“Yep.” Loki folded his arms, and Darcy laughed like it hurt.

“Sorry, I’m crap without a director.”

“Yep.” Loki tried to look bored, not like he was holding his insides in with sheer force of will. Darcy flinched, and then gave him a shadow of that old challenging look.

“I... I don’t expect you to forgive me all at once. But...”

Loki held up a hand. “Let me stop you there.” He wasn’t sure if his resolve would hold if she finished her sentence. He took a deep breath.

“I... No, is my answer.”

Darcy blinked in hurt and frank surprise. Loki wondered if he looked the same. All the times he’d played this very idea out in his head, because of course he had, of course he’d wanted her to come back, forgive him, or admit she was wrong, or anything... His mouth continued to speak.

“I mean, I wanted to keep you. That doesn’t really happen to me... And well, if you left again...” He almost smiled, remembering the scalding heat of tears. “I don’t think I’d survive it. You’re everywhere. Even on the cover of some of these books. You even left a hair-tie on my bedroom table. There’s nowhere to hide, you see. My world isn’t that big, and you’d overwhelm it. I’d suffocate, for lack of you.”

Darcy’s face was carefully blank, her jaw set and eyes wide. Loki felt like his heart was being sawed in half with a wooden ruler.

“You do a pretty definite no,” she said, a little shakily. Loki didn’t trust himself to speak. He already wanted to take it back, wipe the look of her face and make her smile again. He squared his shoulders against it. 

“I should go...” Darcy adjusted her hat, not looking at him. 

“Right.” Loki had the feeling of being very far away and very close all at once, his stomach swooping with the vertigo of it.

Darcy turned to go. “You know, the fame thing—Darcy Lewis, child star— she’s not real. At the end of the day, I’m just a girl, standing in front of a very tall boy, asking him to love her.”

Loki pressed his lips together and stared at the blotter on the desk. Darcy left. After the bell jangled, Loki reached out with trembling hands and picked up the box in numb fingers. He opened it. A first edition of _The Hobbit_ , complete with dust-jacket, some foxing on the corners. He opened it absently.

_”I was once told that no one should write in a book, especially in pen. So I wrote this on a piece of paper. Perhaps we could glue it in? Truly and unmistakably yours, Darcy.”_

Loki picked up his phone.

 

Half an hour later, Natasha bumped herself up the step at the front of the shop. Steve followed, and flipped the sign to ‘CLOSED’ behind him.

“Hey.” Natasha maneuvered carefully between the shelves. Loki handed her the book, wordlessly.

“This is it?”

“She left a note,” Loki pointed out, dully.

“Oh.” Natasha opened it, and read the round handwriting. She looked up at Loki. “How are you holding up?”

“Oh, you know, I did the right thing. I told her no.”

“Good decision,” said Natasha firmly. She made a slight movement with her elbow, and Steve creased up a little, making a ‘hng’ noise. 

“Yes, definitely,” he echoed, a little tightly. “You can’t trust these artistic types at all.”

“Precisely.” Natasha nodded, firmly. Loki’s phone rang, and she picked it up. “It’s Tony.” 

Loki put it on speakerphone. “What do you want now?”

“I’m on the plane—what’s up with you?”

“Darcy came back.” Natasha interrupted. “Loki turned her down.”

“What? Why would you do that?” Tony’s outrage crackled down the line. “Have you lost your mind?”

“Tony—” Steve winced.

“I mean, how can someone so smart, be so dumb—oh, fine. They say I have to switch my phone off. See you soon. And don’t do any more stupid shit. Jeez...”

The phone went dead and they all stared at it.

“Did she actually say she wanted to go out with you?” Natasha opened the book thoughtfully, not looking at Loki. 

“Well... not in so many words...” Loki was still staring at the phone. A terrible feeling was stealing over him.

“Well, that’s good, isn’t it? I mean... Anyone saying that is nice?” Steve said, in a voice like dropping pebbles down a very deep well. There was a feeling in the room like Tony had unleashed the world’s biggest and most anti-social elephant. One that had the evil grin of someone determined to share its bad news come what may.

“It was sort of... Well, actresses can sell anything, can’t they? But she said. She said she was just a girl, in front of a boy, asking him to love her.”

Natasha closed the book, and laid it on the table very carefully. “Of course, turning her down was the only recourse from that.”

There was another long, thick silence where the elephant flipped through a book and put it back in the wrong place.

“Oh.” Loki went over to the glass cabinet and knocked his head against it, hard. The cabinet, being perfectly used to this, made a hollow bonging noise. “I’ve done it wrong. _Shit!_ ”

Steve looked at the ceiling and frowned at the boot prints. Natasha smiled at the book. Loki stopped banging his head on the cabinet, on the basis it wasn’t the cabinet’s fault he was a grade-A twat.

“I don’t even know where she is... No, wait. When’s the next flight to LA?” Loki grabbed his phone and promised that if this worked he’d never ever let Narfi push the thing off the sofa in a fit of not-sharing-cushion-space ever again. He fumbled with the phone, cursing touch-screens, Steve Jobs, and 3G internet, repeatedly and in no particular order.

“Oh god, it goes in an hour.” He tossed the stupid thing to the desk.

“I brought the car,” Steve volunteered.

“Quick, go.” Natasha shooed Loki in front of her. “Don’t just stand there! Move!” There was a hint of the sergeant-major and that one PE teacher who would inevitably make the ‘lazy’ boys do press-ups in her voice. Loki dashed out to the car, galvanised more by fear of sit-ups than any romantic desire. Steve followed, more hesitantly. 

“But Tasha...” He turned back to his wife. Loki jigged from foot to foot impatiently, there wasn’t _time_.

“No, you have to go. I’ll only slow you down. You still haven’t got folding the chair down.” Natasha was watching from the doorway.

“The hell you say,” Steve snapped. “Loki, move your Icelandic ass. Come on!”

He swept Natasha out of her chair. “My gal.” He kissed her soundly and slid her into the front seat whilst Loki struggled with the horrible chair, got his fingers trapped, and flung it in the boot of the car, cursing. Then he climbed into the back seat.

“I hate the back seat. Who is it made for, dwarfs? I don’t even have a beard.” He grumbled as he accidentally inserted his knee into his own nose. “Really, I never thought I would have to know my knees so well.”

“Oh shut up.” Steve started the car and put his foot down. “Or would you prefer to walk?”

Loki shut up and Steve blew out a calming breath. Natasha put on her seat-belt as they junked round a corner.

“Careful,” she warned as a black cab blared its horn angrily. 

“And you can be quiet as well.” Steve’s Brooklyn accent thickened as he bent over the wheel. “Bond girls don’t give directions.”

Steve had put quite a lot of effort into quashing his accent, modifying it to more generic accent he assured them was ‘Midwestern’ (whatever that meant), as British people tended to assume that he was a gangster otherwise. Nowadays, you only heard it when he had to put up Ikea furniture. Natasha raised her eyebrows and braced a hand on the dash, smiling to herself. Loki leaned forwards.

“How come when I say things like that you hit me, but when he says it, you just go all girly?”

Natasha reached round and pinched him, still smiling. Something occurred to Loki.

“My passport! I need it, Steve, we have to turn round.”

“Are you kidding?” Steve growled, the accent practically a patois as he swerved round a white van.

“Is this really the type of situation where I would?” Loki snapped. Steve pulled a sharp U-turn, winding the window down to flip off a bus.

“Where did you learn to drive like this?” Loki gripped the door and wished he had an extra seat-belt. 

“My friend drives a cab in New York.” Steve squealed down the road and Loki tried not to scream like a girl. When Steve came to a whiplash stop, he tumbled out of the car and into the house, where he spent the longest thirty seconds of his life sifting through the shoebox he kept his passport in. He barely managed to shut the car-door behind him when Steve slammed off again, plastering Loki against the window.

“I swear I drove with less manic tank drivers...” Natasha mumbled.

“Steve, you do know you can’t just drive over islands, right?” Loki tucked his passport into his jacket pocket, jouncing up and down.

“Do you want to drive?” Steve demanded, taking his eyes off the road for a terrifying heartbeat to glare at Loki.

“No, he doesn’t.” Natasha squeezed her husband’s thigh, and leaned over to kiss his cheek. “There’s a good reason Loki doesn’t have a licence.”

She leaned back, but her hand stayed where it was.

“Oh, get a room,” Loki grumbled as they flew bouncily over some speed-bumps.

“It’s our car,” Natasha replied, unperturbed.

“It’s my desperate mission,” Loki argued back, wanting to say anything to prevent the enormity of what he was proposing to do wash over him. He wondered if the desire to vomit was due to nerves or Steve’s distressing tendency to treat roundabouts as a suggestion.

“I told you two to shut up!” Steve’s accent turned it into ‘shaddap’. He leant on the horn and stuck his arm out the window, middle finger raised stiffly. “Yeah, you too buddy. And your mother.”

Natasha was still smiling to herself. To be honest, Loki could see where she was coming from.

 

They stopped in front of the departure lounge with a screech of tyre that seriously scared some Japanese tourists. 

“Out out out now now now!” Steve barked. Loki half stepped, half fell out of the car. As he passed the driver’s side door Steve grabbed him by the jacket and pulled him down level to his eyes.

“Don’t fuck it up, Iceland.”

“No, sir.” Loki meant it, too.

 

-*-

At first, Loki thought he’d missed her, and it was all for nothing. Then he saw her, standing in line patiently. He tapped her on the shoulder, breathing hard. She turned, and her eyes widened.

“I don’t want to marry you,” Loki said abruptly. 

Her brow furrowed. “What?”

Loki rushed on. “I was thinking about it on the way over, and I don’t want to marry you. Not now, anyway. I mean, they always do it in those stupid movies and you just know it’ll never last. So I thought maybe we should talk first, you know, about stuff.”

“Well, I’m about to get on a plane. You said no.” Darcy’s face hardened.

“I know, and so am I.” Loki held up a ticket, triumphantly. “It’s just, we need to talk a lot, and I figured this might be the best way to do it.”

“But you said no.”

Loki huffed with impatience. “Yes, and that was incredibly stupid of me. I — I want to keep you. And love you, and maybe if you’re very, very lucky I can marry you.”

“If I’m lucky?” Darcy gave him that challenging look, the one that had started all off. Loki’s heart did a weird melty-fluttery thing that made him wonder if he should seek medical assistance.

“Well, obviously I’m lucky as well.” He allowed. “But that’s not the point, you’re missing the—Look, just say we can talk.”

“Fine. We can talk,” Darcy said, blushing a little and lacing her fingers through his as they walked up to the gate. 

Despite himself, Loki smiled.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading.


End file.
